First of all, I want to greet everyone a happy new year. If you’re one of the few people who somehow, for some reason, frequent my blog, know that I am full of gratitude for your attention and interest. It is because of you that this website has not become some dusty corner of the internet, like I had expected it to be, when I first put it up back in 2019.
As a kind of “thank you” to my readers, I will do another movie review for the end of the year. I noticed that my film reviews are some of my more popular posts on here (literally my review of I’m Drunk, I Love You is my overall best performing post, with more than 2,000 views), despite my having posted it years after the movie first came out.
And similar with I’m Drunk, I Love You, here I am reviewing another TBA film years after its initial release. I’m talking about Tayo Sa Huling Buwan Ng Taon (lit: Us At The End Of The Year), directed by Nestor Abrogena Jr. and released in 2019 as a sequel to Ang Kuwento Nating Dalawa (The Story Of Us*) from 2015. While it might seem like I’m intentionally choosing to review this movie today, literally at the end of the year, the story behind my viewing of it is actually quite random: I came across it last week on Youtube, to my complete surprise and satisfaction that TBA had actually uploaded other movies than I’m Drunk, I Love You during the pandemic, and I had just simply failed to notice.
For a bit of context: Ang Kuwento Nating Dalawa first introduced us to lovers Sam (Nicco Manalo) and Isa (Emanuelle Vera) on their way to university aboard the LRT. The movie became quite a hit thanks to an accompanying music video by Quest featuring scenes from the movie, with lots of longing shots inside the only subway station in Katipunan, and of the two characters inside packed trains. Although holding on to each other, the two appear to be miles apart, frowning away from each other towards empty space.
I’m an easy guy to please. I love trains. The music video and trailer promised lots of it, so at my urging, my then girlfriend and I made it a point to see the film when it finally screened at the Cinematheque Center near UN Avenue station. But as you would remember from my review of I’m Drunk, I Love You, by that time my relationship with said ex-girlfriend had already come into a rocky point, and the movie resonated with me to a point beyond what the movie was actually – technically – capable of doing. When the movie ended I caught myself holding tight to her hand, a gesture that failed to escape her notice. We spent the rest of the evening after watching the movie assuring each other that our relationship would never meet the same fate.
But remembering it now, with a cooler head, I recall very little plot movement. Other reviews of the film that came out at the time corroborate this sentiment. Sure there was the beautiful cinematography: perfectly angled shots of our lovers beset on all sides by strangers in a tightly-packed train, gradually becoming themselves strangers to each other, we see the city through traffic jams under bleak skies, people scuttling like ants towards jeepneys, taxis, and trains. But for all its visual bravado, the plot struggles to really take off, and whatever dialogue is shared between characters feel like throwaway lines, lines said just to fill the silence between – to borrow Rolando Tolentino’s terminology – MTV moments. Throughout the course of their commute, Sam and Isa’s relationship falls apart with the subtlety of a passing highway collision. But who are these people and why should we care?
Tayo Sa Huling Buwan Ng Taon suffers from the same problems, but it’s all the more visible now due to its rather ambitious attempt to add more characters to the fold. Whereas the first film was content to focus on two people whose already tenuous hold on each other is only becoming more and more precarious, now we are following people – Isa and Sam with their respective new flames – and it’s therefore much more evident when the plot grinds to a halt.
It is now five years since their break-up, and Isa is dating a pilot named Frank (Alex Medina) and are planning to move to the United States on New Year’s eve, while Sam appears to be in some kind of live-in arrangement with girlfriend and colleague Anna (Anna Luna). Both appear to have found a genuine kind of contentment and happiness in their diverged lives, and the movie makes a point of showing us so: the first half hour of its 105 minute runtime is dedicated to showing sweet nothings and tender moments between the two couples. We know just from the fact that it’s a sequel that they are bound to meet each other again and somehow re-kindle or at least process the break up, but an entire hour passes before they even get within glancing distance of each other. At so many points, I felt compelled to just close the Youtube tab and switch to a new film. It felt like an over-extended epilogue: and they lived happily ever after. Again, so what?
Finally, in what would normally be the rising action of any conventionally written story, they run into each other again at a Christmas lighting event in Makati, where Sam is working as a freelance photographer, and Isa is part of the marketing team involved with the event. Abrogena takes full advantage of this chance meeting for an MTV moment: we get a delicious one-take of the two former lovers, struggling to find words for each other now that they are back in each other’s lives. Just as they must be dizzy now, we follow a dizzying dolly shot of them showered in thick fog and dazzled lights.
This is immediately followed by another MTV moment. Now they are back in their respective bedrooms going through instagram stories of the night just passed. After a brief hesitation, at last they muster the courage to exchange messages over instagram. Each message invites a pause, with each character looking longingly at the words as if all this time, this was what they wanted, what they had been longing for all along. The tight close ups are accompanied by the haze of cigarette smoke and heavy atmospheric music.
The above is a perfect encapsulation of my ongoing frustration with the two films. Every scene feels like little more than narrative bridges between the different MTV moments of the film. The MTV moments being the point, rather than punctuations to heighten the impact of the storytelling. The dialogue contains too many throw-away bits and pieces that don’t give us much insight regarding the characters, where they’re headed, or where they’re going. That is not to deny credit to the actors: Vera and Manalo make a lot out of the little they’ve been given, and it at least adds to the viewing experience to watch them pepper their dialogue with the pained expressions and pregnant pauses that, in retrospect, carry greater meaning than the actual words they exchange.
But the emotional and narrative disconnect is the problem: we spent so much time learning about how much better and content they’ve become with their current lives, that when they suddenly pine for each other and make all these excuses to stay connected after a chance meeting, the audience is left to wonder why this, all of a sudden. We hadn’t seen any indication until now that they felt some kind of void in them, or any kind of melancholia for someone no longer present. When the climax finally comes, their explosive interrogation (or rather, Sam’s explosive interrogation) into why they’ve ended up apart, it feels like a slap in the face, and not in a good way. Suddenly we’re watching a different movie. We’d drifted off and the channel got switched. What are they fighting about, anyway?
Make no mistake, I can certainly enjoy a vibes movie where the plot is relegated to the back seat. I saw Hong Sang-soo’s On The Beach At Night Alone and marveled at its quietness and lack of insistence. But where both movies in this series failed is its failure to let us understand its characters at a deeper level. We threw away the film’s entire first half just to force a dramatic reconciliation and another break in the second half. What is it about Isa that Sam continues to long for? What is it about Sam that Isa just can’t quite get away from? And what about the new boyfriend and girlfriend? Some brief scenes hint at a possible dissatisfaction within Isa’s new boyfriend Frank, and towards the end he even says so himself. Anna herself appears to be going through something of an emotional turmoil, what with her family selling away their precious land. How do they feel, being relegated to mere side characters to two ex-lovers who seem to have little remorse burning the people around them for a relationship that ended five years ago?
Again, it isn’t all bad. And like Ang Nawawala, and Ang Kuwento Nating Dalawa, this is a movie that might hit you at just the right moment of your life and become something special, something worth remembering. If you can stomach spending 100 minutes of your life witnessing two characters so desperate to leave and yet unable to move, then I think this might at least be a decent viewing experience. Not to mention the shots are again just as delicious to see as in the first film. If you can see this on a big screen, it would at least make the experience worth it.
Stray Observations:
- At one point in the movie, we see Isa try and fail to book a taxi back home. Hilariously, Sam responds by saying they should just take the train. Obviously a callback to the previous movie. But they are no longer taking the same train. Instead, they are waiting at opposite platforms, whereas they spent the entire first film riding together on two lines of train.
- Tayo Sa Huling Buwan Ng Taon is a story of departures. Of a girl who is ready to take off, and a guy who remains fixed in place, but both of them appear unable to move forward. He talks of plans to leave, but we see no such departures happening. Fittingly we learn in their explosive exchange that he tried to go to the US for Isa after she left (sometime between the two movies), but his visa got denied. He re-applied and got denied a second time. At the train station, when his train comes, the door opens, but we barely see him move.
- Plot hole: at one scene, Sam’s brother asks him to come with to a camera store near Binondo to get his camera fixed. Sam is hesitant, but Anna convinces him by saying it’ll be on their way when they buy Christmas presents anyway. In the next shot, though, while they’re buying presents, said brother is nowhere to be found. At first I tried to excuse this with maybe the brother is meeting them on a different leg of this trip, but he never makes an appearance again, and we completely throw away that bit of dialogue.
* Apparently the official English translation is The Story Of Us That Never Was, but I find that tacky. I prefer my version.
Dominic Dayta 
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