Pioneering poet and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson thrived as a miraculous mind who was able to articulate childlike awe within the everyday. Emerson is quoted in regards to the need of maintaining this awe, “Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting — a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”
While not quite Emerson, rising filmmaker Shireen Seno has proven herself as quite the visionary herself. As a filmmaker, Seno wields a similar fascination of childlike wonder that Emerson possessed, and with her latest film “Nervous Translation,” the Japanese director taps into her inner-child for the second straight film with another coming-of-age project bathed in curiosity and poignancy.
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Fumigated by the Phillipine’s socio-political dysfunction of the ‘80s, this elegant elicitation of childhood wonder follows the fanciful interpretation of the world surrounding eight-year-old Yael (Jana Agoncillo). Often left to her own devices after school, the curious child secretly plays and replays audio cassettes that her father sends home to her mother while working overseas (Yael’s only contact with her father). Like any fatherless child, Yael desires to reconnect with her own. In the meantime, she sheathes her sadness via TV advertisements and immerses herself into her own little world with an even smaller kitchen.
With clever use of POV, viewers are tasked with sifting through abstracted scenes and heavily impressionistic imagery in order to piece together the circumstances influencing how the young girl envisions the world around her. Meanwhile, Seno delivers cryptic clues of the disparate conditions that ravaged the Philippines in the late-eighties, hinting at societal turmoil following Ferdinand Marcos’s fractured regime. Nevertheless, these foreboding allusions never overshadow the film‘s touching depiction of childhood imagination.
Unfortunately, Seno’s youthful slew of surreal events often makes “Nervous Translation” hard-to-follow to the point where the child’s abstracted point of view becomes too disjointing.
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Through several diversions between reality and Yael’s imagination, the viewer never really gets a chance to truly resonate with any of the characters, especially Yael. With that being said, Yael’s window of distracted thoughts and emotions makes any attempt to delineate seem futile. If Seno had remained more focused and receptive to her viewers, the film’s already breathtaking final moments would have hit even harder.
While the storytelling of “Nervous Translation” never quite finds its footing, there is much to appreciate with Seno’s original and ambitious project in spite of its lack of cohesion. Although not always effective, Seno, in a bold move never strays from Yael’s fragmented perspective. Keeping the prior in mind, as Yael retreats into her world of make-believe, perpetually relistening of her father’s voice, the filmmaker manages to beautifully capture the oblique half-understanding and fragmented memory that characterizes childhood engagement with adult affairs, especially when it’s made obvious that secrets about her father are withheld from young Yael.
Though not a perfect film by any means, Seno’s effort is an astounding improvement upon her debut “Big Boy.” While her affinity toward children and curious POVs resurfaces with “Nervous Translation,” her personality and singular style permeate the familiar “coming-of-age” blueprint. With a far more complex exploration of the internal world of a child, Seno validates her standing as a unique and rising voice within the film industry, as “Nervous Translation” galvanizes her ability to devise an innocent scope of complete awe in an attempt to come to terms with the crumbling yet beautiful world around us. [B-]
