There was simply no way that Cathy Garcia-Sampana’s Hello, Love, Again could have lived up to its 2019 predecessor — only the second highest-grossing Filipino movie of all-time, and a great example of a blockbuster romantic drama done right. But even as this Canada-based sequel gives in to contrived plotting and half-baked characterization, much of it also manages to keep the DNA of Hello, Love, Goodbye intact. At least up to a certain point, the film remains a serious, honest portrait of overseas Filipino workers and the difficult, if not outright dehumanizing, nature of having to work one’s way back up from the bottom of the ladder.
There is a clear moment in the film where Garcia-Sampana and her writers, Carmi Raymundo and Crystal S. San Miguel, take a sharp turn and ask us to majorly suspend our disbelief — a gambit that the movie doesn’t really recover from. But up to that point and beyond, typically strong work from Kathryn Bernardo keeps the drama anchored to genuine, complicated emotion.
The film begins on a clean slate, breaking up the relationship between nursing graduate Joy (Bernardo) and Hong Kong bar owner Ethan (Alden Richards) when they cross paths post-pandemic in the city of Calgary. This setup alone, at first, feels like a cheap way to manufacture conflict between two already firmly established characters, but Hello, Love, Again makes a surprisingly sound case for itself. In flashbacks spread throughout the film’s first half, the dissolution of the couple’s seeming happy-ever-after is depicted as their dreams crumbling under the pressure of one new responsibility, one new expense, and one new misunderstanding after another.
We get these flashbacks in increasingly more frequent fragments — an editing choice (by Marya Ignacio) that comes off quite effectively as a wave of anxious memories coming back to our protagonists’ heads. As the break-up is revealed to us, the film is both smart and compassionate enough not to side strictly with either Joy or Ethan. Joy’s continuing habit of taking on more than she can reasonably handle is a move obviously made out of desperation to make ends meet, while Ethan (who, let’s be clear, is absolutely not a saint) finds himself sorely beaten down by the embarrassment of getting lost on his delivery route and, later, having to clean up human feces. Even when Ethan puts the final nail in the coffin for the two of them, the conditions under which the couple have to work (during the outbreak of COVID-19, no less) always remain the greatest antagonist.
It’s also during these sequences where Richards and Bernardo are at their most compelling. The biting arguments they get into have nothing to do with either of them falling out of love with the other, but with the circumstances of their work shortening their capacity for patience and empathy. Richards makes sure to never forget how Ethan holds onto his own ego, his former success in Hong Kong constantly tempting him away. But it’s Bernardo who continues to prove how strong she’s grown as an actress, having gotten to know this character inside and out, and allowing every conflicting emotion to dawn on her during any given moment. When she scolds Ethan for getting into a fight with a disrespectful co-worker, her annoyance and anger are mixed with a desire to break through to his better nature. You can practically see the gears spinning in her head, as she already tries thinking of new ways to recoup their losses.
It’s when Hello, Love, Again gets to that previously mentioned moment, around halfway through the film, that it loses most of its moral complexity — in favor of a fake marriage plot that might have a legal basis, but is still depicted as a fan-fiction fantasy. This sudden diversion in the plot isn’t necessarily unwelcome, but both characters’ emotional journeys are undeniably accelerated through this entire second half, and all the way until a lazy ending that rings far too easy and feels like a betrayal of the maturity that Hello, Love, Goodbye so often displayed.
When the film’s focus shifts away from the particulars of OFW work (and of maintaining good relationships at the same time), the rest of the film’s imperfections also begin to show. Where Hong Kong was given its own unique color and character in the previous film, there’s a generic quality to the way Calgary has been depicted here. The smallness of the world and its lack of distinct cultural markers make the characters’ decisions feel all the more arbitrary. Even after a strong first half, Hello, Love, Again essentially admits to a lack of trust in the things that make it more real, which made the first film so deeply felt by a general audience.
