An outer calm belies the inner turmoil of the Filipina caregiver at the center of Isabel Sandoval’s “Lingua Franca,” a small and affecting feature set mostly in the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn. (It’s streaming on Netflix.) Her name is Olivia, she is played—with extraordinary understatement—by the filmmaker, and she brings seemingly inexhaustible patience to the job of looking after Olga (Lynn Cohen), an elderly Russian woman who is often befuddled though not defeated by dementia.
Olivia, for her part, lives with steady-state anxiety. She’s an undocumented immigrant, looking over her shoulder for ICE agents while hoping for a marriage, arranged or otherwise, that will win her a green card. That’s her plight, and she finds a candidate in Olga’s grandson, Alex (Eamon Farren), a wanna-do-well—one step up from a ne’er-do-well—who wrestles carcasses in a slaughterhouse. If this plot sounds predictable, it is and it isn’t, and you may want to stop at this point to watch the film before reading more about it. Or I can tell you more about what makes it so satisfying before getting to what makes it distinctive.
Ms. Sandoval and Eamon Farren
Photo: ARRAYMs. Sandoval is a confident storyteller with a fondness for the quirks and surprises of character—any character who comes into view. She asks us to be patient while Olga peels an orange, and, as you might guess, Olga peels oranges very slowly. But the old girl also has spirit to spare, albeit in spurts, and does not suffer fools in her family gladly. “I may be old,” she lashes out at one point, “but I’m smart as a whip!” Olivia isn’t conventionally beautiful, but her voice carries the weight of her experience gracefully, and her smile is beguiling as she gets Alex to pronounce a few words more or less recognizably in her native Tagalog, or in Cebuano, the language of Cebu, the island where she was born.
Olivia’s distinction is that she’s a trans woman, played by a trans woman filmmaker. That’s not meant to be a big revelation, either here or in the film. “Lingua Franca” is, first and foremost, a story about yearning, vulnerability and sexual awakening in which the complications of identity are revealed slowly, with a dramatist’s awareness that our perceptions will change, or undergo a succession of changes, before we come back to seeing the decreasingly calm Olivia for who she is, a passionate spirit on an uncertain journey. As for the lingua of the title, it could be Tagalog, Cebuano or English, but more likely it is indispensable, instantly translatable love.
Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com
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‘Lingua Franca’ Review: Looking for Love - Wall Street Journal
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