IN the end, a plane flies above the city of anonymity: Is that the plane carrying Joy, or is that somebody else’s flight of happiness. No one knows, no one cares.
Would I spoil the audience’s right to enjoy Cathy Garcia-Molina’s Hello, Love, Goodbye by narrating my story about this lovely film from its ending? Well, you might ask: Can anyone spoil at all one’s appreciation of a Filipino rom-com? One can, with regard to this film. And that is the good news.
The bad news first: Hello, Love, Goodbye is ruined by noise and it is not coming from the city. The noise is provided by a gaggle of actresses—Kakai Bautista, Lovely Abella and Maymay Entrata—whose performances are not only over-the-top, but over any tolerable intelligent decibel. The three players seem to belong to a school of acting which warrants a lot of screaming, shrieking and flailing of arms. The first time they appear the feeling is one of amusement. The succeeding scenes where they are around are not only aggravating but constitute an invasion of any moviegoer’s private and sacrosanct privilege to view a film that succeeds to convince us that love—in more than an hour or so—can indeed grow between two souls burdened by all the conflicts the universe can provide.
The story by Carmi G. Raymundo (with the screenplay from Garcia-Molina, Rona Co and Raymundo herself) has many twists and turns that it is to the credit of the director and the two leads that we never get confused where the story is leading us.
What Hello, Love, Goodbye is simply telling us is that two people can really fall in love, be sincere and pure about their feelings toward each other even without…ah, how do I write this review without revealing the ending of the film?
Joy Marie Fabregas and Ethan del Rosario are two Filipinos working in Hong Kong. Joy is a domestic helper (how old is this term already?) and she does not have a stable status in the city. Ethan works in a bar and is near becoming a resident. He also lives with his father who may be sick but nevertheless stands for a semblance of a family. This is not the case for Joy, whose mother, we discover, is also in Hong Kong living in with a Chinese “husband”. This mother is battered but she clings on to the Chinese because he is her only reason why she is able to live in the former British colony. To complicate the personal violence in this woman’s life, her husband—Joy’s father—is still alive. He, the Filipino husband, knows his wife is shacking with a Chinese husband who serves as a guarantor. The Filipino husband, brave yourself, is also blind.
Joy works as a caregiver to the aging, cantankerous mother of a woman. This woman has a child who has, depending on the moment, a kind of cerebral palsy that makes her both endearing and troublesome. I am not shaming disability here; I am looking at the uneven performance of the child-actress playing the role of Joy’s ward. As if the role of a domestic helper with bad papers is not bad enough, she is also supplied with characters of such extreme handicaps.
It is in one of those precarious situations when Joy meets Ethan. The young woman encounter this young man as she looks up from a bundle of trash after running away from the Hong Kong policemen. It is not the kind of romantic entanglement that is easy to accept. One can even say there is dirty (pun intended) manipulation in this section of the narrative. The fact also that Ethan has the temerity to make fun of a woman or a person while she is cowering in fear, shame and dirt can be just too much. And yet, when the camera looks up—as we become Joy trying to discover who that man is behind that voice—we realize what close-up (0r medium shots) can do to a film.
Was it the great songwriter who said “A close-up onscreen can say all a song can”?
In the theater where I watched the movie, there was a swoon as Kathryn Bernardo and Alden Richards, as Joy and Ethan, respectively, gazed at each other. I can understand that swoon as the two actors enact for us what happens when chemistry and fate and the stupid, silly, scary, lovely forces of the universe conjure to create a tale of love.
The close-up shots, the lingering gazes are threads running and unspooling as the story of Joy and Ethan unfold. In between the making of the tapestry are the commercial compromises of incorporating comedic shots that force us to laugh or, when they are too much, distract us unfairly. Interestingly, the noise of the city gets muted in Hello, Love, Goodbye. In hindsight, I wish the other scenes had been muted, as well.
The sight of Filipino women in Hong Kong is real, but it is an imagery that proves to be an unnecessary clutter. Not that they need not be talked about but when the phenomenon is not explored appropriately, their presence is in itself a violence, a utilization of a crowd that does not explain why they are there.
Two fathers disabled is too much. A younger brother who carries the burden of his elder brother’s failure in love is obsessive. We are not interested in their stories.
What we are interested in is what happens to Joy and Ethan? Will they live happily ever after, as the celebrity of Kathryn Bernardo teaming up with the unusual career trajectory of an Alden Richards threaten to engulf this narrative?
What happens is nothing short of a filmic miracle—a credible ending to film that teases us for being unreal first. Holding up this shrine to love are two discoveries—for me, at least. There is Bernardo with perhaps the quietest performance for any actress of her generation. Bernardo can act within a small frame, holding her face solidly as if a slight movement will mar that portrayal. In love stories, the actress usually is the sole recipient of the loving gaze of the camera. Not in Hello, Love, Goodbye: Alden gets the cinematographic love, as well. His Ethan starts fun and ends tragic but with lots of hope, even if it does not matter what happens to that hope. When those tears fall from Richards’s eyes, they bring us back to those old, old cinemas of leading men looking beautiful and strong in grief.
It is to the credit of the director that she ends the film with the cityscape. We have witnessed a story about love, and that is good—beautiful—enough.