Cinemalaya 2013 Reviews: Transit

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Full disclosure: I’m no cinemaphile. I dropped out of English Lit—not once, but twice; I have absolute disdain for the Hollywood trend of scraping Stan Lee’s brain for movie ideas.

That said…

I enjoy a good movie; I bob my head to a good soundtrack; I LOL at physical comedy, homages, and well-placed references; I am deathly allergic to the over-long camerawork in Filipino movies; I can forgive bad lighting and awkward dialogue that has been obviously translated from an English writer to Filipino; good cinematography can save a terrible local, indie movie.

Transit: Written and Directed by HANNAH ESPIA
CAST: Ping Medina, Irma Adlawan, Mercedes Cabral, INTRODUCING: Marc Justine Alvarez and Jasmine Curtis-Smith

The two movies and the shorts films that I watched had only to hurdle very low expectations. Transit, the first I saw, described the plight of the oft-praised bagong bayani, the OFW—in this case, the ones who live in Herzliya, Israel.

The trailer was clear enough; the lingering backward glance of the 4-year old boy, Joshua, set up the movie’s theme perfectly: undocumented children were targeted by the Israeli immigration authorities making them the invisible residents. Their Filipino parents live in constant terror by the otherwise helpful and watchful police.

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Filipino parenthood is already burdened by the demons of the developing world. Raising a child in another land while caring for elderly and infirm foreigners is hard enough. Great potential here.

Transit puts us in the shoes of some of the 10 million Filipinos working and living abroad. I have visited one such flat in Norway where more than a dozen of our countrymen live in a three bedroom to save on rent and create surrogate families. It is a cloistered world where they share resources and chores, not to mention memories, gripes, and fears.

Welcome to the life of the average OFW. Fertile with dreams and the wry smiles and fatalism that is characteristic of our people.

The movie does well to paint a shade of this life; Brady Bunch-style living (Janet and Moises are unrelated adults each with a kid), birthday celebrations like mini bailes in public spaces under lamplight, interracial friction and the fear that “my daughter will grow up to be just like me.”

What Transit has in heart, it lacks in storyline. What it has in despair, it lacks in escape. What it has in reality, it lacks in hope. 

The synopsis:

"TRANSIT" begins and ends in an airport during a father and son's transit flight from Tel Aviv to Manila.  It tells the story of Moises, a Filipino single-dad working as a caregiver in Herzliya, Israel, who comes home to his son Joshua's 4th birthday.  It was on that day that Moises, together with their Filipino neighbors, Janet and her daughter Yael, find out that the Israeli government is going to deport children of foreign workers.  Afraid of the new law, Moises and Janet decide to hide their children from the immigration police by making them stay inside the house.

[Read more synopses here]

This is the entire movie. The B-list mini-ensemble was brought in to broaden the appeal, while the narrative device—“chapterizing” the story—is an attempt to give us the perspective of five characters. Unfortunately, it is five bridges to nowhere. No clash or discrepancy; no tangent thread; no reason to move the story forward other than to finish the movie and wait for the applause.

The corollary characters add nothing to plot of the film, because there is no plot. There’s no struggle to imagine an alternate world; there’s no third force poised to derail our characters’ existence; there’s no contrabida or anti-hero to create dynamic or drama. Nothing interesting ever happens. The employers of the two main adults in the movie are quite nice and caring. (One Israeli helps get the mother out of trouble early in the movie, but this is just in the exposition and she doesn’t play a significant role elsewhere.)

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It’s a milieu piece, and a barely passable one. It merely skims the surface of different social stresses.

The best part of the movie was in the vignette of stories by the tertiary actors, the bit players (I suspect actual OFWs there) who gathered around in a circle to tell the newcomer what life was like there. It was their candidness and reality that stood out, even though they were just one-liners.

In conclusion, if you think you have no idea how the average Filipino is doing abroad, watch this film, but watch documentaries more. Because the truth—whether imagined or real—is far more interesting than this fiction.

[Read the HeyGarch.com reviews of The Diplomat Hotel, and SHORTS A here.]