Melbourne is a good city to live in, with its fast-growing economy and the already diverse nationalities of its occupants. The city welcomes expats especially from neighboring Asian countries. In fact, most Filipinos who decide to work, live, or both in Australia usually have Sydney or Melbourne as their top choices for cities to have their fresh start in.
Matthew Victor Pastor may look like a typical millennial, but underneath the playful surface lies an Australian Filipino who wants to talk about diaspora. The film is a triptych of sorts which pays homage to the Filipino Australian experience, with key segments in "glorious cinema-o-ke" which is actually a music video of sorts playing onscreen of music by Fergus Cronkite.
The film may be a crusade of sorts to show the community formed by expats in Melbourne, but because of its nonlinear narrative and confused camera movement, we care little about its central characters: the pick-up artist, the feminist documentarian, and the virgin. In fact, the only character I remember is one supporting character, the girl who likes to suck cocks and do flexibility exercises in a dance studio.
However, another way the film can be read is that the whole of the film itself is a metaphor to the confused identity and hodgepodge of selected memories that come with being away from your roots and tracing it back again. It might work for some but this kind of messy direction didn't work for me at all.
This is the second film of Pastor in his trilogy about identity and discrimination within the same minority, the first one being the 2016 film I am Jupiter.
RATING: 2/5
No comments:
Post a Comment