Two from Isabel Sandoval in the Philippines

I don't really understand why Apparition (2012) is called Apparition. The film is not about hauntings or spirits or apparitions of any kind – even though the poster totally makes this look like a horror film. Sandoval's movie is about a group of nuns living outside of Manila in a convent in, like, the middle of a forest during 1971 and 1972, when progressive factions were attempting to displace the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and he eventually declared martial law.

The acting in Aparisyon is wonderful. Raquel Villavicencio, in particular, gives an intense, beautiful performance. I fell in love with her in this. And Mylene Dizon and Fides Cuyugan-Asensio are also excellent.

The movie's plot is interesting, but Sandoval is a bit too precious of a filmmaker, to my mind. She doesn't build the psychological tension that is needed for this film to work well. Her preciousness translates to a focus on minutiae that feels too closed off, too isolated and messes up the pace of her films. She takes things just a little too slowly, because the moments in the film are so precious. This makes her films feel slightly off, like they could have been told in a more economic or direct way. There are way too many lingering shots.

But I like Sandoval a lot, and I'm planning to watch her film Señorita before the end of the month. I saw Aparisyon on the Criterion Channel, where it'll be playing until September 30.

* * *

Update. Señorita (2011) doesn't have a poster, so I'm just going to write about it here. Señorita is a political thriller that I really wish had been filmed a bit more like a film noir. As it is, it follows most of Sandoval's normal filmmaking habits, but watching this film – her first – did illuminate a few things. It's far too precious, like Aparisyon and Lingua Franca, but in Señorita it is clear that Sandoval is emulating the slow sequences from Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love, and Wong is a good model to have. Sandoval's Wong-inspired sequences, though, don't have the poetic intensity of the master's. They seem, instead, simply to be there. As if the poetry will arrive if we take our time.

There were things to like about Señorita, and about halfway through, I thought we had been moving at a really good pace – except that I had thought we had started act three and we had not. this clips along at the beginning, but it slows down considerably, and the film's second half is plodding and precious.

Lingua Franca (2020)

Lingua Franca is good – not great – but Isabel Sandoval is excellent and so is Eamon Farren. Where the movie falters is in its thematics. The title, for example, refers to language, but the film isn't really about the way that the characters love one another or communicate with one another. It certainly isn't about a lingua franca of some kind. I also felt like the movie directed its attention in just a few too many places. This could have been a film about both central characters or it could just have been a film about Isabel Sandoval's character. It tries to split the difference - to give us some of Farren's character's story without delving too deeply. This doesn't quite work. The one other thing I found annoying about this was the way the film continued to come back to Donald Trump in clunky ways. Of course Lingua Franca, which is the story of an undocumented woman working as a caregiver in New York, is about the hateful xenophobic policies Republicans and Donald Trump have perpetuated. It would be fairly difficult to watch a story like this and be confused about that. No need to underline the point awkwardly for us. So... the filmmaking has some problems, but I liked this movie. It's romantic and sad and occasionally very smart. It tells a story about trans women in the U.S. that is seriously underexplored, and the actress–director telling the story does so in mostly understated ways with an beautiful performance.

Lingua Franca is available to watch on Netflix now.