“While the film is entertaining, beautifully shot and wonderfully acted, what it lacks perhaps are nuances in its telling of a tale of women abused and those who perpetrate the abuse.”

In Panorama title Enjoy Your Stay, Swiss filmmaker Dominik Locher returns to examining social conflict and power dynamics, as he’s done before in his 2013 title Tempo Girl and his 2017 Goliath, which premiered at the Locarno Film Festival. When we first meet his protagonist Luz, an undocumented Filipina working as a cleaner at various rental chalets in the Swiss Alps, her resolve is palpable. Played by TV and film actress Mercedes Cabral (well known to audiences who enjoy Filipino dramas on Netflix), she works and hangs out with a co-worker with equal gusto, all the while saving money to send to her daughter at home. Her child Sofia lives with her husband, and Luz is desperate to have the girl back in her family, living with her sister in the Philippines. 

Looming over Luz and her co-workers, all of whom are clearly trafficked to work long hours at underpaid wages, is their boss Thibault, played by Alexis Manenti. He controls them with a mix of kindness and authority, which is at first unsettling, and eventually gets worse.

Set during the Christmas and New Year’s holiday season, the film takes on an extra layer of poignancy after the recent New Year’s tragedy at a bar in the resort town of Crans-Montana. We see the kids who both caused and succumbed to (or worse yet, were injured by) this insurmountable calamity up close. And perhaps it gives us an insight into how sometimes having too much can take everything you love away. When Luz’s husband ambushes her and makes her participate on a Filipino reality show to debate the fate of their daughter, our pint-sized heroine decides to take matters into her own hands. Hoping to go home for a break to reclaim her rightful place as Sofia’s mother, she counts her earnings and realizes she’s coming up short, and what she did have she leant out to people who now refuse to pay her back. It is then that Luz decides to become a kind of trafficker herself, an enabler in the scheme, bypassing the usual broker Madame Rina. Adding to this already precarious arrangement, her boss Thibault and his thuggish collaborators decide to change the game for Luz and the girls. And that’s when all hell breaks loose…

Reading the synopsis for the film one could be tempted to skip it, as it sounds gloomy and dire and without any hope. What gives Enjoy Your Stay something hopeful and cinematic are the performances by an extraordinary cast, and the cinematography by 120 BPM (Beats per Minute) DoP Jeanne Lapoirie, which makes us feel like flies on the wall of the story unfolding before our eyes.

While the film is entertaining, beautifully shot and wonderfully acted, what it lacks perhaps are nuances in its telling of a tale of women abused and those who perpetrate the abuse. I love cinema in shades of grey, where even the worst character has a redeeming quality and the saintly ones have a wicked side. While I type this I realize those shades are hidden in the story written by Locher along with Filipino writer Honeylyn Joy Alipio, but they fail to truly stay with the audience once the film is over, perhaps overshadowed by the events in our reality. There is also a sense that rich people are bad and poor people are good, as a fellow viewer said after our screening, which makes it all too black and white. From a cinematic point-of-view though, Enjoy Your Stay fulfills its promise of keeping its audience gripped and engaged throughout the film. And for that reason, it is a must watch.

(c) Image copyright: CloseUp Films