Tomorrow is Another Day to Say Goodbye

I Love you Goodbye

Laurice Guillen

Philippines

2009

A beautiful woman in distress meets a kind, rich, and separated man, a heart surgeon and a café waitress in love. With the doctor’s family in high society, intelligent ex-wife, meticulous mother, and hard-headed daughter, everything for this soon to be second wife, step daughter-in-law, and stepmother is turning upside down. The story may quite be typical, but as what we are all explained by our creative writing and scriptwriting professors in college, there is no absolute new story that any person can ever think of, unluckily we are now living in the time of the world after numerous generations of imaginative production, a story will be new by how it is told. And I admire how this story has been told.

“I Love you Goodbye” is a flawlessly fashioned romance. The film has a smart deception in its narrative and is greatly accentuated by dexterous editing. One of the reasons why I think my attention has been following the ideal of being focused to what it is watching is because you never quite won’t know what is going to happen. This uncertainty, this sense of excitement, this activity of participating with expecting where these characters’ capricious understanding and enthralled repressions will lead them is definitely and almost unthinkable in the façade of excessive commercialism reflecting in our local cinema reflected from our local television, and of course our Republic’s predisposition to economics than arts. The film has a major flashback that lasted for like less than 10 minutes, after the first 30% of the film, and it is all about the abruptly ended romance of Gary (Derek Ramsey) and Lizelle (Angelica Panganiban), and the seemingly transient pain of the break-up to the fairy tale-like love story with Adrian (Gabby Concepcion) . It is definitely not an exaggeration, I must argue, that this simple scenes of flashback makes “I Love you Goodbye” a competitive film. I am not saying though that all films with flashback are competitive, it is just that first, no uncompetitive films dare to have such flashbacks, and second, a flashback is an evidence of any film’s attempt to utilize the astounding powers of filmic techniques. In that major flashback, Adrian who plays a major role in the first part of the film and for the rest of the film, becomes a secondary character slowly collecting all the majority of the film story and film plot as that flashback ends and as the film plot returns to the real time. I have a high regard for that shift in point-of-view. If you have read from my previous reviews, I really have that respect for point of views and any form of shifts from it. The film as I have mentioned above has a smart deception, cutting some scenes and projecting it to another scene where its cinematic tension and revelation would be multiplied by ten. I have to mention the scene where Ysa (Kim Chiu) is talking to her dad, we are all waiting if she will show the pictures of Lizelle taken by Gary. The scene is cut after I thought Ysa may have not shown the photos when she showed sincerity in not wanting her father to be hurt, and reading between the lines, her sincerity in wanting her father to be happy, and thus may she accept the fact that her father is really in love Lizelle. Just when I thought also that Ysa’s ace has been buried by her surmised surrender, we found out that she has really shown them to Adrian in a conversation of disclosed secrets between him and Lizelle. “I Love you Goodbye” maintains its excellent hold of viewers’s attention with its playful manipulation of point-of-view. Basically, it is Lizelle’s point-of-view, though we also see point of views from all of the four main characters (or at least four lead ABS-CBN stars, for Kim Chiu’s role is not that significant really). Some revelations work perfectly and just amazing because of this shift in point-of-view. When Lizelle goes to the bus terminal to elope with Gary, the man never showed up, and we never heard of anything from him anymore until one day Gary’s lawyer inform Lizelle about his death. The point-of-view has never exempted Gary buy for that specific scene, he is, and the result is very interesting.

Great characters adorably compels every frame and second of this movie to be interesting and worthy. The characters are well fleshed-out, excluding Ysa. Her resentments are seemingly latent and way too under-developed, that’s the exact reason why I think she is not a main character, as what I thought she is considering the movie poster and all the promotions. Adrian, Lizelle, and Gary are adorable characters. With my utmost commendations for Adrian, his character has been one of my most favourite of all time. Half probably of his character’s success is coming from Laurice Guillen’s intelligent control in the over-all of the film. Just when I thought again that Adrian really kills Gary or has something to do with his death, and just when I thought I was on the verge of disappointment to learn Adrian as a person who can really kill, Guillen just expands how lovely Adrian’s character can be. In a confrontation with Gary, the latter got hit by a car, and as Adrian explains to Lizelle, no matter how much he wishes him to die, he just can’t let him die.  The only thing that Lizelle can get mad may be the fact that he doesn’t tell her about it, which she actually accepts right away, perhaps thinking that Adrian is a hero and not the killer, and that maybe she really loves him, or that makes her love her. Gabby Concepcion’s acting is decent. There are some parts though when he is trying to be charismatic or frankly, cute and young that I am not sure if it works, but quite forgivable. Haven’t really watched a Sharon-Gabby movie but I got a funny feeling that that is exactly how he used to get “cute” 20 years ago. Lizelle’s character is of course the heaviest, deepest and most important character and has an enormous chance of getting a Best Actress award for all of the pain the character is enduring. Angelica Panganiban is not the best choice for the role. She did not give a very bad performance but she did very plain. I am not a fan of her but that is not to cancel out my criticism because I do not love her at the first place. I love the character so much and I wouldn’t love the character if I really don’t like her. The reason I think Panganiban is not the perfect choice for the role is because she has a subtle sarcasm in crucial points of her sentences that are bit dissatisfying. Big scenes when she is bursting out in tears with Concepcion, and there are seconds when I thought it has been the best I’ve seen from her but then after that extremely brief moment of believing that completely everything now on this film works, she gives that final syllable of her sentence with a give-up blow that is a bit annoying. The delivery of dialogues for big moments is still not comfortably natural and powerful for me as I used to see from her in other movies. Angel Locsin could have been the perfect Lizelle. Gary is a good character. He is mysterious from the beginning and becomes mysterious again at the end. His passion about photography is the best part of his character for me. I often wonder why I don’t see many artists in Star Cinema movies; he is one of the two I remember. I usually love films that have such characters, because it creates a mirror image of what is in front of the characters we are watching when they are filming it. A little too personal but it has always added an extra spice and interest in me watching those films. Derek Ramsey, I am neither a fan nor a critic. I am not a fan because I always see the same thing from him. His performance is just like playing the role of Derek and not of Gary, like what he just did with his character in “And I Love you So” and “T2”. But he is adorable enough not to be annoying and become an anti-Derek. The reason is clear why Derek landed the role. I don’t need to elaborate on that. Kim Chiu for the first time stars in a film without Gerald Anderson, and I don’t suggest her doing another one. Better have her on the lead with her onscreen sweetheart because she becomes so forgettable as a supporting character. She is still so itsy-bitsy, teeney-weeney in the film and I don’t think she is really ready for any drama of the same intensity especially without Anderson. This is not her fault though, it is also because her character unluckily is not as lovable and well-developed as the other characters, or has any youthful spank perhaps. The problem here is simple—the actress is popular and the role is not, even a bit insignificant resulting to worthless overestimation of the young actress’s attempt to be separated with Anderson for at least a movie. 

The ending is fantastic, almost. I have always wanted love stories to end not with the person they really love, and thus live the rest of their lives miserably, painfully, and regrettably. That is an exaggeration of course, but I enjoy those endings rather than the living happily ever after movies.  Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain” is so melancholically romantic because of that. Sometimes, when I feel more inspired I want love stories to end also happily but not with the person they thought they couldn’t live without, so I find Terrence Malick’s “The New World” joyful yet still too gloomy and piercing, so as Jacques Demy’s “Umbrellas of Cherbourg” which is really a heartbreaker. Panganiban and Ramsey working together in this Star Cinema’s official entry to the 2009 Metro Manila Film Festival automatically gives us the idea how are their characters going to be related, definitely not siblings, nor friends, but lovers. I have been praying from the beginning of the film for Lizelle to choose Adrian and for her to dump Gary because it is surely going to be another sickening and tiring love team ended movie in town if ever. Another fantastic technique Guillen used to produce this film is to have the Lizelle in the narrative as fickle-minded to as clueless and totally confused of what she is going to decide as she is to naturally create the tension of whether the film is going to be another love team ended one or a real good, brave, and honest film. I am not saying though that love team ended movies are not honest, it is just that for every single T.V. series and movies from ABS-CBN and Star Cinema that has been produced and this may also apply to all commercial production houses in the world, cute and hunky boy always, no matter what, and magically still ends up with his pretty and sweet girl that the law of reality has always been violated and the plotlines has always been resided. Though the film ended the way I would want it to be, for Adrian be with Lizelle, and not be alone to have Lizelle joining Gary, I just thought it is a bit obliged. Gary died, and so if Gary just appears in the bus terminal then I could have cursed this movie for expecting this is a different film. I would have wanted the film to give Lizelle the obvious will to make the most important decision in her life for I think most of the time she has been so unsure of what she really wants. Her uncertainties though have been cast away by Gary’s death and therefore leave her without the second choice, and continue her life with Adrian. The ending is generally fine with me. It actually is a reminiscent of a familiar 2007 Star Cinema movie “A Love Story” where the lead man (Aga Muhlach) end up with who we thought as the second woman (also Angelica Panganiban), and have who thought as the first wife (Maricel Soriano) as the martyr, the sad, the forgiving, and the hero. I feel good about this quality romance drama Star Cinema is investing for the past couple of years. I just wish more control from individual directors over these movies because “I Love you Goodbye” and “A Love Story” are alarmingly a little similar to think that they are directed by two different directors Maryo J. Delos Reyes for “A Love Story”. I appreciate the fact that a commercial line like Star Cinema is producing such unconventionally ended movies however I wish to notice the line developing auteurs in their well-budgeted films.

I also noticed a trend happening in the line’s recent movies—sudden death. Gary’s death is just so unexpected, not even a single preceding element to get a hint of the nearing death. In Olivia Lamasan’s “In my Life”,  Luis Manzano’s character also died abruptly in the same way as Gary—a hit and run by a car. This is changing the conventional guideline of an effective screenwriting that you can’t have a character die out of the thin air, that you are not an effective screenwriter if you let the audience utterly shocked of a death, and that if an audience scans back at the movie in their DVD player and don’t see any hints of their death then you are not doing it right. I am also glad that Star Cinema is taking a bold step about this.

I am going to say that “I Love you Goodbye” is the best commercial movie of 2009.