part of Cinema One Originals 2013
At a more superficial level, it's a love story about a couple of call center agents, but through more discerning lenses Shift is an interesting look into the lives of young Filipinos who have crossed the line of adolescence but are not yet full fledged adults.
Estela (singer Yeng Constantino) is one of these people. She is trying to apply for new jobs even though she is already employed by a call center. She builds a friendship with fellow call center agent Trevor, and over time, these feelings begin to grow. Unfortunately, there's a catch: Trevor is gay and already has a boyfriend. This plot point, along with her uncertainties in the direction her life is taking her, forms the center of the film.
The whole culture of these call center workers is quite fascinating. They work weird hours in a stressful work environment, and their job is in a state of flux: affected mainly by the state of the outsourcing market. In a sense, it serves as a microcosm mirroring the plight of many Filipino yuppies: fresh from graduation, looking for direction but finding none, pilgrims in a transitory, ephemeral world between childhood and adulthood.
As such, the love story in Shift reflects this sentiment about the youth; like all things, this too shall pass. It's a story greatly helped by a great soundtrack by many independent musicians. The chemistry between the two leads and some supporting characters helps too.
Social media and texting are depicted in Shift as means of communication and disseminating information. The way the movie does this is by showing the text beside the character, so you can see the text (most of the time; sometimes the text is too small for my old eyes) and the character's reaction at the same time without resorting to a shot of the cellphone/computer screen. It's very clever and it seems to be part of a trend on how online media is depicted in contemporary cinema.
Ironically, despite all these means of communication, the greatest problem that Shift's characters have to overcome is a communication problem. These are the words that even texts and posts of Facebook can't express. It's that raw, personal, emotional kind of confession, face to face, from one person to another, that matters. We do not see this in the film until the very end.
Shift ends with Estela looking directly at the screen, imploring us for clarity, looking for answers on where everything's going to go from here. And the thing is, in the small cinema where I was watching, a lot of us were her age, and probably in her situation too. And that's the point, I guess: even as she asks us this in the last moments of the film, we don't really know the answer, either.
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