Pinoy Sunday is a movie about a red couch. More specifically, it’s a movie about Manuel and Dado, two Filipino migrant factory workers in Taiwan, who dream of luxury and better days, and discover a discarded red couch on a Sunday, their day off. They decide to carry the couch back to the dormitory where they live so that one day they might be able to relax under the stars, drinking beer, stretched out on their couch, after a hard day’s work.

As the genre requires, they encounter many vicissitudes on their journey: a collision with a motorcyclist gets them picked up by the cops; a lady spotting them walking by with a couch sees this as an opportunity to cushion the fall of her son who is standing at the top of the apartment building threatening to jump; and enlisting the help of someone with a car puts them on a long detour to the middle of nowhere.

They are racing against the clock, since they must return to their dormitory before curfew at 9PM or else risk deportation. The couch, of course, is a symbol of luxury, and of hopes and dreams. It’s an impractical, heavy, clunky thing that they must carry across the city, with the hope of one day finding comfort and joy from it. Ultimately, this is a film about the difficulty of maintaining optimism and motivation against all odds, which seem to point towards your dreams being crushed. The rich red of the couch forms a beautiful contrast with the grey-white city landscape that Dado and Manuel traverse throughout their journey. We get a great look at the streets of Taipei with some sublime photography filled with rich colours; here the costumes make an important contribution to the overall stunning aesthetic. The film ends on an incredibly ambiguous note, where it seems that the characters have, to some degree, achieved their dreams of using the couch while simultaneously losing part of their livelihood. The last twenty minutes have a dream-like quality, which makes it possible to distinguish between dream and reality, leaving us to fill in the blanks as we see fit.

The characters in Pinoy Sunday are not the most likeable or kind people, but we sympathize with their plight and their unwavering devotion to achieving their dreams against all odds. The film successfully and commendably maintains a light-hearted atmosphere of good cheer and humour despite the real struggles the characters experience of the separation from home and family and the hardships of the factory worker’s life. We really want them to succeed in carrying the couch all the way home because, by the end of the film, their simple dreams become our dreams. Pinoy Sunday is a good film, with some great moments, but it does drag at times and fail, at times, to fully develop its themes and characters as fully as I would like.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2010 at 9:53 pm and is filed under Film, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.