A check-in on her daughter Sofia back in the Philippines is surprisingly grandiose for Luz (Mercedes Cabral) in “Enjoy Your Stay,” taking what precious time she has with her child even though it’s discovered to be part of a live broadcast airing on national TV. Her ex-husband Tonio has decided to make their custody battle public in the ugliest way possible, resorting to a sleazy talk show on which she’s an unwilling guest and sitting in Switzerland where she’s long earned a living as part of a cleaning service with the hopes of getting back to Manila, it can feel like she actually is trapped in the box outlining her on the phone. The scene seems a bit extreme when it comes out of nowhere in the drama, threatening to mirror the garish nature of the talk show itself, but director Dominik Locher’s increasingly wild and engaging third feature gets all the better for lacking pretension.
Luz can’t afford to put on airs herself as an undocumented immigrant who tends to the wealthy in the Swiss Alps, part of a workforce that is at once considered negligible when her boss Thibault (Alexis Manenti) instructs his staff that “if there’s a backdoor, use it,” so as not to be seen, but also indispensable when the rich leave a mess like no one else. Although the guests at the chalets where Luz and her crew picks up the trash are rarely seen, their effect can be seen on her own way of thinking when she needs to come up with the money to afford a proper defense in her custody battle, increasingly unsympathetic to anyone else’s needs but her own. She is faced with an intriguing moral quandary when Thibault and his boss Valentin ask if she can recruit more workers for the holiday season, knowing how awful the work is, yet desperate for cash, the bonuses she’ll make per person has her calling up aunties and scouring churches where she can promise fellow Filipinos that they’ll make more mopping up houses than as nannies.
There is never a point in which Luz is to be pitied in “Enjoy Your Stay,” setting it apart in at least one way from similar narratives as she races against time to reach her financial goal, yet Locher and co-writer Honeylyn Joy Alipio do well to express the downstream dehumanization that that makes everyone numb to how they’re treating one another. Although the camera is often tethered to the frantic movement of its main character, stray moments where Thibault’s own child can be seeing outside playing in the cold as he argues with one of his employees about not receiving their proper wages when he’s had to make sacrifices of his own to keep working are as effective as getting into Luz’s mindset as any of her direct actions and while there’s a Safdie-esque chaotic energy propelling the film forward, it also effectively conveys a warped reality that Luz and company operate in when money becomes the only motivating factor for just about everything, suspending logic for expediency. It turns out to be a master stroke to set the action during the holiday season, not only a busy time for the luxury resorts, but a succession of parties for Christmas and New Year’s that seem more and more difficult to clean up after and mean something else entirely to those who can’t celebrate.
The subtler stuff Locher does right makes the brasher elements more forgivable when Luz has to suffer the absolute worst to drive home her plight, from the implausible aforementioned live TV broadcast of her family’s dirty laundry to someone accidentally stepping on her hand while she’s picking up shards of a broken wine glass. Yet to see the fur coat that Luz puts on for warmth gradually start to appear as a status symbol in all the wrong ways as she successfully manages to start indoctrinating people into the same life she hopes to escape — along with the fact that Cabral wears it well throughout — is one nuance of many that supports the overall point in “Enjoy Your Stay” that there is more power underneath the surface of things than might be suspected.
“Enjoy Your Stay” will screen again at Berlinale on February 15th at 3:30 pm at Urania, February 16th at 10 pm at Cubix 7, February 18th at 10:45 am at Colosseum 1, February 20th at 3:30 pm at Zoo Palast 1 and February 21st at 10 am at Urania.