Round Trip (2003)

Round Trip is a celebration of the ordinary. Its lead characters are fairly ordinary people and the film is shot in an unobtrusive, “real” feeling way. However, at no point did Round Trip take these ordinary characters and turn them or the movie they inhabit into something extraordinary.

Round Trip begins with a woman named Nurit leaving her husband. Nurit takes her two children and leaves her smaller town for the city of Tel Aviv. Here, she struggles with being able to support her children through work while also taking care of them. As such, she puts out a notice for a live-in nanny who would live rent-free in her apartment in exchange for childcare. Enter Mushidi, a Nigerian immigrant. While Nurit and her children are initially cold to the foreign Mushidi, they eventually warm to her and she becomes an important part of their household. Mushidi and Nurit specifically bond on late nights and days the children are with their father. Eventually, the two women begin an affair. However, this affair leads Nurit’s ex to anger and he says he will sue for custody of the children given Nurit’s homosexual affair with a black woman.

A major theme of Round Trip seems to be about putting women and female narratives front and centre. There’s a lot in here about Nurit struggling with a work/life balance and the sacrifices women make for their children. Additionally, in Nurit and Mushidi’s scenes together, the dialogue always has an undercurrent of the secret depths and struggles of women that they might not share with outsiders and specifically, men. This is a perfectly okay narrative and theme that in abstract, I support. However, none of this provided me with new information or challenges to my world view. I am a woman so I already knew that women are people and stuff.

The romance in the movie never really sizzles. Mushidi and Nurit’s increasingly charged conversations are decently written but lack chemistry. These women appear to be friends more than attracted to each other at least until they start kissing. Round Trip does not offer some epic love story or even an average love story with a lot of solid romantic tension. Nurit and Mushidi’s journey from acquaintances to lovers is frankly, bland.

My god, does this movie do Mushidi dirty though. She’s the best, most sympathetic and hardest working character but she remains relegated to less important love interest and accessory to Nurit’s journey. There’s definitely some unexplored irony that Nurit leaves her husband because she feels overworked and underappreciated. Then, when Mushidi enters the picture Nurit very much takes on the husband’s role. Mushidi works numerous jobs in addition to caring for Nurit’s children for free. Nurit never fully acknowledges how much Mushidi does for her and her children nor does the movie give adequate focus to Mushidi, the most interesting character with the hardest life.

Given the ending, I don’t know what the overall tone or take away of Round Trip was supposed to be. The movie ends with Nurit moving back to her small town. She remains divorced from her husband but as the title of the movie suggests, she ends the film almost at the same place she began. Is this good? Did she learn something about herself in Tel Aviv that made her realize where her true home was? Or was this a tragedy, that Nurit can’t change her life no matter how desperately she tries? I don’t know. I don’t know how to feel about this ending. To me, it seems quite tragic but the movie up until then was not a tragedy.

All I do know is that I am once again annoyed about the film’s treatment of Mushidi. While the end of their relationship causes Nurit to go back to her home town, Mushidi returns to Nigeria. How and why are we focusing on the woman whose post-breakup move was a few hours within the same country and not the woman who returned to an entirely different continent and once again lives in a country where homosexuality is illegal? It’s very hard to care about how Nurit feels when I’m too busy worrying about Mushidi.

Round Trip features a basic premise you could find in a lot of movies. This execution of this premise is mediocre. Round Trip lacked emotional focus and wasn’t emotionally resonant for me. More than anything though, Round Trip took a huge misstep in not having Mushidi be their lead character.

Overall rating: 5.1/10

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