By Rex Catubig

 

MY return to movie watching in the theater early this week, after a six-year hiatus, in part brought on by the Covid pandemic, was disenchanting. The movie that seduced me into going, Hello, Love, Again, is the much-ballyhooed sequel to an earlier smash hit and stars the undisputedly most bankable screen luminaries, Kathryn and Alden.

But the film vocabulary is hackneyed, the scenic idiom, contrived. Why is it that characters in our local movies are always rushing and trying to do a million things all at once? As if time management is a foreign concept. And why is the supporting cast, always hyper and loud, with adrenalin spilling all over? While the leads are morose and joyless, steeped in misery, gripped by a masochistic alliance with bad luck.

Some movies are like that, but they rise above the quagmire they’re caught in. And in the end, they tug at the heartstrings and are heartwarming, and if lucky enough, they connect the heart and the mind and leave you feeling good and thinking clearly.

And this leads me to a movie experience from way back, that I had written about. That I find,  provides the right antidote to my current disenchantment.

Eons ago, my friend laughed out loud when I told her the last Pilipino movie I saw in the theater was Pagdating ng Panahon with Sharon Cuneta and Robin Padilla. I reminded her that we watched it together, back in 2001 at the CSI Cinema, with nary a thought how old we were.

And now, 17 years later, there we were at the Robinson’s handing out our senior cards to catch the last full show of Never Not Love You, featuring the pop couple James Reid and Nadine Lustre aka JaDine.

No two movies could have been so different from each other. Even the box office response was as dissimilar. The two huge stars of Pagdating failed to generate enough attraction to save the movie from bombing at the tills. In contrast, this present movie, Never Not Love You, featuring a fledgling love team,  had been drawing crowds and creating waves of interest across demographics. And judging from the reaction of the audience we were mixed with, the millennials were captivated.

Pagdating was an ode to a bucolic time, gentle folks, and a charming way of life. It was a loving portrait of mores and customs as they relate to the courtship dance in a rural setting. I loved the movie then as it kindled heartwarming emotions. Until now, I am still enamored to sing along to the theme song whenever I hear it playing.

But time, indeed, flies and overruns memories and stale emotions. Without realizing it, we are caught unaware that love as we know it has taken a whole new dimension.

Never Not Love You, reinterprets and relocates love in the time of the internet and overseas work. The simple boy-meets-girl tale that was waltzy and schmaltzy before, has taken on a quiet but angst-ridden turn, a pas de deux of raw passion and syncopated heartbeats–caught in a centrifugal chamber of runaway feelings.

It felt like I was in a time warp and suddenly I found myself evolving and tossed into this new world of love and relationship.

Yet new as the setting and context were, love as we have known and felt all along, remains a constant. Notwithstanding the guise it assumes and masquerades itself with, it still possesses the power to excite and to hurt , to confuse the soul and imprison the heart.

As the movie ending suggests, there is no finality ever. We take the chance and embrace the risks as our heart flutters in the incongruous fusion of joy and uncertainty.

The incongruity of love and hurt and their eternal struggle, is what keeps us on our toes, that keeps us alive, and fuels our passion to survive, prove our worth, and make a difference.

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