‘Though the emotional journey is familiar, it always finds a way to land’
When Hello, Love, Goodbye was released into theaters in 2019, it became an unparalleled box-office success, uniting Kathryn Bernardo and Alden Richards, actors who were departing from their respective love teams, with director Cathy Garcia-Sampana, arguably one of the pillars of modern day commercial romance films.
Set in Hong Kong, Hello, Love, Goodbye captured the hearts of Filipinos locally and abroad in its depictions of the struggles of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) Joy (Bernardo) and Ethan (Richards) and the persistent tensions between fulfilling familial responsibilities and chasing personal aspirations.
Part of the appeal of the original film’s ambiguous ending was the promise of a possibility.
In the abstract commitment between the two lovers to stay connected and supportive despite physical distance, there was a glimmer that somehow there was a future where they could be together despite the odds. Whether earned throughout its runtime or not, it’s this optimism that keeps people returning to theaters like how fairytales, in their formulaic structure, help children fall asleep.
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The question is: What is left to say in a sequel? Hello, Love, Again does not try to replicate the magic of Hello, Love, Goodbye and is a far more mature and darker work. Garcia-Sampana condenses the five years since Joy and Ethan said their goodbyes in Hong Kong and follows their journey throughout the pandemic and in the present-day, where they reunite in Calgary as exes whose financial situations have completely flipped.
Like its predecessor, one of the strengths of Hello, Love, Again is its assertion that blue-collar labor and the material conditions that prevent people from experiencing any upward mobility often interferes with love and connection.
Sequences are dedicated to discussing the pathways to become a permanent resident in Canada, narrating the mechanics around deportation, and sharing personal, even if peripheral, experiences of permanent displacement from the Philippines.
The transactional reality of care and the pressure to build a home in others has become a recent hallmark in the several Star Cinema releases since the pandemic — An Inconvenient Love, A Very Good Girl, Rewind, and Un/Happy For You — and it peaks in Hello, Love, Again, when Joy and Ethan are forced to live out the life they promised each other.
In an extended and uncomfortable sequence, Joy and Ethan argue about the kind of cash jobs they are willing to take in Canada amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Egos come in. Hurtful words are exchanged. Dreams die as soon as they are brought up. A deeper incompatibility in their futures surfaces, rupturing the romantic illusion of their union.
In these raw moments, Garcia-Sampana exposes the emotional heart of their film — the woundedness of two souls who are too tired to add the emotional labor of their failing relationship on their to-do list.
Many of the film’s less effective moments come from its attempts to be lyrical and poetic. In their decision to use subtext as text, Garcia-Sampana and writers Carmi G. Raymundo and Crystal Hazel San Miguel exchange the romance in the small minutiae for grander gestures and pictures of love, rendering quiet moments forced and inorganic despite their good intentions.
Hello, Love, Again is at its most romantic when it leans into the limpidly simple and everyday displays of care — when meals are prepared together, looks are shared, and considerations and small sacrifices are made. This magic in the mundane helps the narrative become grounded amidst the unignorable celebrity of it all.
But beyond this, Hello, Love, Again’s larger contentions and questions around the space aren’t fully developed. Hello, Love, Goodbye was a beautiful portrait of Hong Kong’s vibrant life and community that doesn’t shy away from being an equally damning portrait of the suffering and political underbelly that often subjects our OFWs to abuse.
On the other hand, Hello, Love, Again feels like an underdeveloped picture of Calgary and its community, lacking the sociocultural and historico-political contrast between the local and the Philippines that could make the inequities stark, and the decision to migrate justifiable to those unfamiliar with the OFW experience.
Towering above the lapses and repetitions are Bernardo and Richards’ performances, whose relationship and acting skills have matured since their onscreen debut together. Bernardo is luminous as she shifts quickly between assured yet cold present-day Marie and the emotionally vulnerable Joy, while Richards is less showy, his eyes being the most expressive thing onscreen.
Joross Gamboa and Jennica Garcia break the ice in many sequences, providing humor to an otherwise dramatic film. It helps that cinematographer Noel Teehankee has photographed the actors and the world indelibly, making their warmth felt despite the palpable cold of Canada through the screen while editor Marya Ignacio adds to the performances by juxtaposing scenes from the present and the past, tying emotionally resonant histories between Joy and Ethan that continue to bubble up as forms of unresolved trauma.
Despite the melodrama, the cheesiness, the unease, and the at-times distracting sheen in the production, there is something exciting about watching Hello, Love, Again in theaters with others who are open to it.
At the midnight screening, kisses become sources of riotous cheers, jokes become a source of communal laughter, emotional confessions draw ooohs and aahs, and failed romantic gestures become sources of eyerolls. There’s an energy that’s always around a romantic drama and commercial films that should never be dismissed. So though the emotional journey is familiar, it always finds a way to land. – Rappler.com
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