Lingua Franca Finds Common Ground

Caregiver Olivia (Isabel Sandoval) sits at the table in her ward Olga’s (Lynn Cohen) kitchen. On the outside, she’s still. On the inside, she’s shuddering. The soundtrack to her day is the wannabe tough man rhetoric of Donald J. Trump, spoken in his nasally, grating voice back at a 2016 rally in Arizona. “It is our right as a sovereign nation,” he whines, a plea to his audience that indulges their white fragility, “to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish here.” Trump’s pitchy racism follows Olivia when she leaves the apartment, walks New York City’s streets, attempts to escape the hatred. She finds a coffee shop and sits down. The buzzing stops.

But it doesn’t really stop. The naked bigotry espoused by the white supremacist in chief hounds her no matter where she goes, and the best she can do is block out the noise for a brief pause as she goes about her days. Her experiences as a Filipino immigrant and a transgender woman are Lingua Franca’s, which Sandoval wrote, directed, produced and possibly provided craft services for because having gone above and beyond to realize her picture, why not go above above and beyond? The movie is a statement piece, a political piece, a personal piece and a meticulously crafted mood piece about Olivia’s struggle to belong in a nation that actively doesn’t want her and doesn’t acknowledge her humanity. The kicker is that as she quietly strolls around the city, going from place to place without a real destination in mind, she blends right into the backdrop. In fact if you don’t watch carefully enough, she disappears.

Disappearance is her overarching fear. Lingua Franca begins with Olivia’s job looking after Olga in the elderly woman’s Brighton Beach home, but melts into a story about American immigration over the first half hour. Even before Sandoval assaults the ears with Trump’s bloviations, a lingering anxiety hangs over the film’s otherwise serene and understated atmosphere: To be an immigrant here means looking for any anchors to keep oneself moored, and Olivia’s efforts at securing permanent residence are thwarted at every turn. Then she meets Alex (Eamon Farren), Olga’s grandson, a troublesome but not exactly troubling recurring alcoholic, and the electrons and ions between them start to spark. It’s a kinetic meet-cute. When they connect and develop a romance, Lingua Franca uses that romance to further express the danger Olivia contends with as part of her life.