Tempting fate

Film Review: I Love You, Goodbye

MANILA, Philippines - Whether as a director or as an actress, the name Laurice Guillen attaches gravitas to any project. As director, just think of her last four films: Tanging Yaman, American Adobo, Santa-Santita, and for this year’s ongoing MMFF, Star Cinema’s I Love You, Goodbye. With a cast headed by Angelica Panganiban, Gabby Concepcion, Derek Ramsay and Kim Chiu, the film is a mature exploration of love and marriage, of second chances, of tempting fate, and the different roads one takes in deciding where happiness can lie. What starts out as a seemingly simple love story of second chances becomes an involving screenplay of duplicity, hidden motives, white lies and “gray” truths, and how “reaching for the stars” can also mean stardust blinding you and/or finding out that your “arms can’t reach”!

Gabby plays Adrian, a successful surgeon (separated, and with a daughter), who through a stroke of fate, encounters Lizelle (Angelica), when she suffers an anxiety attack, and ends up in the hospital where he works. Said anxiety attack was brought on by her fear of water and/or heights, and a dive she had to do to pass some test before working on a cruise ship — something she had planned with her boyfriend Gary (Derek). Of course, Gary is committed to work on the ship, and “junks” Lizelle, who finds friendship and comfort in the arms of Adrian. When the film opens, we see Adrian bringing Lizelle to a family dinner, and Lizelle is like a fish out of water, adrift in the upper crust atmosphere of Adrian’s family and surroundings. There she meets Iza (Kim), Adrian’s daughter, and naturally, Iza is filled with nothing but disdain and spite for Lizelle, fearing she is only after her father’s money and respectability. When her mother returns to the US, Iza moves in with dad Adrian, in the condo where Lizelle has moved in.

Where the plot proverbially thickens and the film takes on a head of steam is when Iza decides to bring home a guest for dinner with Adrian and Lizelle, and that she’s interested in this new acquaintance becomes “extra juicy” as we discover this guest is no other than Gary, back from working abroad. As mentioned, this is a mature screenplay and there are no “black and whites” in this film, no outright heroes or villains; what we have instead, is a great deal of empathy for the different characters, how it’s really all a matter of living one’s life, the decisions one makes, accepts or regrets, and the kind of changes or second chances one can aspire for. Laurice has always been an actor’s director and the relationship she had built in the past with Angelica in Santa-Santita is quite evident; because for me, besides the role being such a great one, this is really Angelica’s film to make or break — and I’m happy to report she truly shines in this bravura performance.

If I have any reservation to this film, it’s how it ends. Just when the complexity of the characters begin to take on a highly-charged, darker hue with the revelation of how Adrian had a fateful meeting with Gary, perhaps in deference to the Christmas season and the need for happy, “all loose ends sewn up” endings, the film refuses to traverse down that path and gives us more of an “all’s well that ends well” scenario that seemed “pilit,” or rushed at the very least. But if the getting there is more than half the voyage, then there’s much to recommend in this film. Knowing that direk Laurice had to continue working on the film right through the illness and death of Johnny Delgado, makes the title that much more poignant..