To say the Filipino production Ode to Nothing is a kind of darkly comedic Weekend at Bernie’s probably wouldn’t be as much of a stretch as it sounds. When you have a film about a lonely embalmer Sonya (Marietta Subong) who finds herself living with her oddball father, running a failing business, and driven to the brink of madness by the constant abuse from her callous, harassing rent collector.
But one day her fortunes seem to change when she is brought the corpse of an old woman whom she embalms and then, somehow convinced the old woman is a good luck charm, begins to treat the cadaver as just another member of the family. Soon we’re subjected to bizarre domestic scenes in which Sonya and her father sit down to eat dinner with the dead woman strapped to a chair. Sonya’s father is happy to play along and treat the cadaver as just another dinner guest, awfully quiet though she may be.
But when Sonya’s string of good luck—as in more clients with dead relatives in need of embalming—begins to run out, things get really bizarre when Sonya begins having full-fledged (but predictably one-sided) arguments with the corpse as she seems to descend further and further into depression and desperation. Although the film obviously frames Sonya’s relationship with this taxidermized dead woman as the focal point of the story, there’s a lot to be said for some of the non-sensational aspects of the film.
The scenes that really carry the movie are the mundane interludes, especially early on, where we get a priceless glimpse into the day-to-day life of an embalmer. We see what someone like Sonya has to put up with to keep her business: difficult, flaky, often skinflint customers who seem to treat the death of loved ones like little more than a mundane nuisance.
And then, of course, just when you thought things couldn’t get worse for Sonya, they get worse. This is a scathing indictment of the latter-day state of Third World disaster capitalist entropy and the idea of alienated labor taken to its most disturbing extreme. Recommended for world cinema and drama film collections in public libraries.
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