Movie Review : Domestic Crisis for a Jamaican Mother

The agonizing plight of Jamaican immigrants to Canada is the subject of “Milk and Honey” (at the Fine Arts), a well-intentioned, particularly well-acted film that falls apart before its midpoint and finishes with soap opera flourishes. A pity, because its star, Josette Simon, is as much a find as “Mona Lisa’s” Cathy Tyson.

Like Joanna Bell (Simon), many of the women who emigrate have been lured by promises of comfortable money as nannies and instead find themselves virtual indentured servants. Joanna has powerful reasons for leaving her small Jamaican town; a single mother, she doesn’t want to see her 6-year-old son, David (Richard Mills), raised in rural poverty. In a wrenching parting, Joanna leaves him with her mother, and in one day makes the jump from the tropics to a Toronto with snowdrifts in the streets.

The cultural differences are almost as severe, and directors Rebecca Yates and Glen Salzman make those absolutely clear in the first sequences. To Joanna, this gleaming clean nanny’s room with its own bath seems amazing; we may notice that the heating duct runs right through it, and it seems to be a conduit for the family’s television sound, but this and a salary of $225 each week seems like heaven.

But her first paycheck, minus all the allowable deductions--her air fare, paid off in installments, a pension plan, the $70 per week they charge her for room and board--is $20. And, talking to other nannies in the park, she finds that she’s as caught as they all are. Until she gets papers as a “landed immigrant,” which can be years, she is a “foreign domestic,” earning a fixed $126.40 per week and forbidden to do any other kind of work.

And so we skip two years. Joanna, whose hair is now handsomely cropped close to her head, is still working for the same unfeeling middle-class couple who now have two babies, and she is savvy, isolated and desperately lonely, her church her only bulwark. The screenplay, by Trevor Rhone and Salzman, makes superficial attempts to characterize her other friends: the warm and pious Miss Emma (Leonie Forbes), bosomy Maureen (Jane Dingle) the Liverpudlian, and the lively Del (Djanet Sears) clearly heading down the primrose path with her con-man boyfriend (Errol Slue), known as Mr. Fix-It for his way with immigration scams.

Joanna has also had an almost-disastrous encounter with a night-school teacher, Adam Bernardi (Lyman Ward), who makes a clumsy pass at her. All these story threads will come together when Joanna brings her son, now 8, up for Christmas holidays, then impulsively, decides she cannot bear to send him back and will try to keep him in the country illegally.

“Milk and Honey” may be a bit flat-footed and didactic in its opening; at least that section tracks and the material is interesting. By the second half, contrivance is all, and it feels as though gaping chunks had been left out, particularly in the relationship between Joanna and Adam, who resurfaces as principal of the school in which she registers the truant David.

It goes now from drama to melodrama to semi-love story to seeming tragedy with an atrocious upbeat ending in Jamaica that solves nothing and makes you wonder for the sanity of the people involved. Salvageable are the performances of Djanet Sears as the unexpectedly malevolent Del, and Ward, whom you may remember as the sought-after senior executive fox-trotting his way to success in “Ray’s Male Heterosexual Dance Hall.” And, of course Simon, a member of London’s Royal Shakespeare Company, who will some day have material worthy of her.