Star Cinema’s “Love Me Tomorrow” can be a brooding montage of different lives trying to find a similar sense of purpose.
Much of this Gino M. Santos-helmed film struggles to deliver its sentiments, because the pieces it chose to construct its puzzle, seemingly don’t fit together. A big part of the story attempts to convince us that these characters are worth-caring about, forcing them to each other’s lives so they could earn the maturity they all long for.
It’s a sad tale but one that doesn’t fully understand why it is, in the first place, and why we should pay attention. Much of it feels obliged to convince us that this unlikely set up of three stereotypes is going to work, but can’t find exactly how it should. And so it spends its campaign through aesthetics and visual glamour, and boring dramas that often lack emotional weight, and congruence to the central sentiment. The result is a miserable mess.
At one point it seemingly asserts that it is just how it is: life is naturally a mess. And it’s right, except it barely displays any effort to fix , or even just improve it. Yet it appears poised it was doing the right thing, banking on the individual appeal of its actors to make up for its narrative shortcomings—a resort which may come across ironic given how the film itself argues at some point that it doesn’t have such flaws to address, to begin with.
The film eventually becomes a consequence of contrasting decisions and poor choices, and its biggest casualties are the characters, themselves.
There is an earnest effort to get across relatable sentiments, here, but they are so often entangled with the film’s conflicting priorities. JC (Piolo Pascual), Christie (Dawn Zulueta), and Janine (Coleen Garcia), are all characters of ambitions, each one with purpose waiting to be achieved, but there is no really evidently logical effort from their part that tells they are actually reaching for it. JC is a conflicted club DJ who aspires to further his career, while Christie, is widowed woman who is just coming to terms with her age, and what comes in his husband’s death’s wake.
Their connection is right away asserted by the film upon first meet, and it’s not hard to giggle over what these two figures with beautiful faces, are trying to make. It feels real and charming in a moment, but there’s really nothing much in the ensuing events that could potentially sustain it. Enter Janine, and everything gets even messier.
Garcia seems to be missing her element here, and you can’t totally blame her with her poorly written character, whose apparent biggest function is just to meddle between CJ and Christie. Much of these proceedings feel misplaced. There’s a solution that doesn’t seem quite correspond to a presented problem, and there are conflicts that are never attended, at all.
“Love Me Tomorrow” is at best a film of display. There are some exquisite visual exploits here that makes parts of this mess somehow appealing, if not at least tolerable. There are relatable sentiments presented, but the way they are delivered could make our sympathy only ephemeral.
But the biggest flaw of the film emanates from its deficient narrative whose most efforts are just spent in presenting arguments that plead for our affection, when it has nothing else than beautiful faces and settings to deliver, to earn it.
RATING: 2/4 (Je)
4 – Terrific
3 – Good
2 – Tolerable
1 – Terrible
