Warning: this review contains spoilers.
Maybe I just hate myself, but my favorite kind of romance is a doomed one, and, in a twisted way, writer and director Irene Villamor’s The Loved One satisfies.
I knew very little about the film when I sat down to watch it at the inaugural Rolling Stone Philippines Film Club . But I heard through the grapevine that there were similarities to Celine Song’s Past Lives and Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So, I braced myself.
The film starts in the present, rendered in black and white, where we meet Eric (Jericho Rosales), an IT guy who has fallen out of love with Ellie (Anne Curtis), a free-spirited woman from a wealthier background. Eric is in a cafe, waiting to meet Ellie for the first time since they broke up a year earlier.
He texts her, “Love you still,” and we don’t know if this is just the ex-couple’s way of being civil to one another, or if he’s possibly shooting himself in the foot. Ellie doesn’t reply.
They met each other a whole decade prior through mutual friends, at a night out, and then at a wedding, where the two waxed philosophical about astrology and Galileo Galilei.
We learn through flashbacks, in color, that the differences between them are stark: Eric is dead-set on climbing the corporate ladder and worries about promotions, while Ellie seems to jump from one volunteer gig to the next as a teacher and social worker, unconcerned with upward mobility. It becomes a point of tension for them when he tells Ellie’s father that they’re saving up to get married, and she brushes it off, saying they had no such plans. Ellie doesn’t want to be trapped; Eric wants stability. She wants room to grow; he feels emasculated.
The film’s title pretty much confirms what Ellie is to Eric in his subconscious: an object of affection, but never truly her own person in their relationship. Eric is not a cut-and-dry trad; he embraces their live-in situation and the possibility of having a child with Ellie, even out of wedlock. But when the doctor delivers the news that she miscarried, he walks out of the hospital room, ignoring the similarly aggrieved Ellie, and goes so far as to blame her for the miscarriage later on — and that makes him an asshole.
Eric’s contemptible behavior comes to a head when he drunkenly trysts with his officemate, Nicole, played by Catriona Gray (he seems to have a type). And when Ellie finds out, he explains that he feels like he’s “losing” her.
Villamor’s writing here is strongest when Ellie and Eric confront each other, whether it’s a shouting match crackling with expletives or their post-breakup reunion at the cafe. Whereas Rosales’ performance is best as a man in love, sizing Ellie up and smiling to himself at the thought of her during their “ligawan” stage, Curtis gives her best during these tense situations. Small nitpick: it’s no wonder Ellie’s stressed, she’s not popping the menthol capsule in her cigarettes before she smokes them, when the joy is in the popping!
My only qualm with The Loved One is that with its nonlinear structure, it feels as if we’re only ever skimming the surface of Ellie and Eric’s ten-year relationship, peering into its depths but never really getting the opportunity to soak in it. But I can appreciate that this is the challenge of telling a ten-year-long love story in 100 minutes.
In her attempt to do so, Villamor creates gaps for the audience to fill, and this is where we must come in — with a willingness to examine our own baggage about commitment and traditional, heteronormative conceptions of relationships. On my part, uncomfortable truths had to be confronted (I’m reminded of an uber-dramatic text I sent my friends when I had to cut someone I liked out of my life: “It feels like severing a rotten limb.”) And ultimately, these dizzying vignettes successfully serve the greater purpose of telling us how a separation came to be, and why, more importantly, it was necessary.
Special thanks to:
Official Cinema Partner for Rolling Stone Philippines Film Club for The Loved One: Opus Premier Cinemas, VIP Cinemas
