Metacritic reviews

Lingua Franca illustrates the woefully untapped potential of marginalized storytellers.

Lingua Franca — which made a splash at the Venice Film Festival last year, the first film by a trans woman to be featured at the festival — is a gorgeous and delicate picture, an understated work that opens a window on an intimate world.

Lingua Franca has a lived-in sensibility facilitated by Sandoval’s empathy and understanding of what Olivia’s going through. It’s the film’s best quality: a firsthand knowledge driving an earnest request to be seen and respected, as an American and as a woman. Olivia isn’t asking for much. There’s no reason to deny her.

Lingua Franca isn’t a screed. Far from it. Sandoval pulls us in gently with long, single takes which are often static, immersing us in the quiet rhythms of the lived-in environment she’s created within the Russian-Jewish neighborhood of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

The expression here is one of shared humanity regardless of background, gender identity, race or creed. The common language being used here is cinema.

Sandoval has made a film with cultural currency and the rich texture of a New York setting for a story as immediate as today’s headlines, and just as sad.

The shared experience between the filmmaker and the subject of the film allows for a character study of depth and intimacy. However, the story itself – a slightly soapy ‘romance against the odds’ narrative – presents few surprises.

Lingua Franca is notable not just for the deftness of its overall assembly and performances, but for its approaching hot-button issues of the moment (the status/rights of both transpersons and undocumented workers) in ways that are insightful without being heavy-handed.

The mood is meditative, the camera patient; yet the film is too dramatically shy and narratively slight to stir.

While Sandoval's hard-working dedication is admirable, and her semi-autobiographical story full of latent dramatic potential, Lingua Franca is ultimately an underpowered, amateurish disappointment.