Nervous Translation

Saw this at the Rotterdam Film Festival 2018 (website: iffr.com/en). In two words: Completely incomprehensible. Though subsequent scenes were trying to tell sort of a story by themselves and thus were self-contained and somewhat watchable, the overarching logic completely went past me. If it were not that I had to attend the next movie in the same venue, I would have walked out prematurely. This movie was selected for the Hivos Tiger Award competition, the flag ship of the IFFR festival, hence arising expectations, yet I cannot imagine what was special or interesting about this movie.

It may be "cute" to make an 8-year old girl the main protagonist, and many will deem that an achievement in itself, but it does not work on me at all. I cannot avoid a comparison with the film Jimmie I saw yesterday, at the IFFR opening event, with a 4-year old boy as main character. In the latter case it was fully functional, carrying the core of the message how a 4-year-old experiences being dragged through a series of hostile environments (sea, borders, etc), hence it meant something there and fitting the context.

Back to the movie Nervous Translation: It is a proven fact that I'm not alone in this negative appreciation, as it received a lowly 170th place (out of 187) for the audience award.

From the moment the title credit appeared on the screen I had a feeling that "Nervous Translation" would be my kind of movie and I was right. This is a child's eye view of the world, full of all the simplicity and innocence of early childhood in which the adults are the interlopers, often shot in close-up.

Yael is a little girl living in the Philippines with her mother. Her father is away from home, working overseas, but he sends messages on tape which Yael plays over and over as if her father is teaching her a new language. Everything is seen from her perspective and Jana Agoncillo is extraordinary in the part, not acting at all but simply being the child in question.

There isn't a great deal of activity in the picture which might not come as much of a surprise when you learn that director Shireen Seno once worked with Lav Diaz, (though at ninety minutes this is Lav Diaz in miniature). The closest the film comes to 'a plot' is Yael's search for what she believes to be a magic pen but even this is treated in an almost inconsequential manner and leads nowhere. The real themes of Seno's lovely little film are loneliness and the power of words, written or heard at a distance. Remarkable really, in a film that is more often silent than not.