Love Me Tomorrow is a story with a lack of consequence. Christy (Dawn Zulueta) lost her husband just a year ago and is now trying to make her way into the world of fashion design. She gets some help from an old college classmate, a self-described "Tita of Manila" working in PR. Her friend brings her to events, where Christy repeatedly encounters JC (Piolo Pascual , a DJ looking for the next step in his career. Christy hasn't even considered dating again, but JC pursues her and eventually wins her over. The two find great happiness in each other, but a rift grows between them as their professional fortunes start going in opposite directions.
One must also mention the character of Janine, played by Colleen Garcia. She's a twenty-four-year-old fashion blogger slash model that pines for JC. She is basically the third lead of the story, her eventual happiness as important to the film as the two others. But she is also a convenient plot device, an empty hole of a person with flat, dubious motivations presented as a possible rival in the story despite having no real bearing on the relationship between the main characters. She bursts into the room following the first night that JC and Christy spend together, accusing the older woman of betraying her somehow.
And then the film makes it very clear that Christy had no idea about Janine’s history with the DJ. And then the film makes it equally clear that it doesn't really matter. Very little matters in this story. The biggest tears are reserved for a dead pet because the relationships between the characters are toxic to the point that they aren’t worth caring about. The film never develops a love worth fighting for, and by the very end, the film seems to make it out that the whole story was just an ugly pit stop in the lives of these people, a story that wouldn’t be mentioned in the memoirs of these characters. That it became material for a full-length feature film is a dubious proposition at best.
This is a movie that says and does a lot of strange things. It might, first of all, invest a lot into defining a character by his DJing, only to make that completely irrelevant by the end. The film seems to want us to care about JC’s passion for his craft, except it never makes us feel that. It never really makes us feel what he gets out of his relationship with Christy either, other than the fact that she looks like Dawn Zulueta. The film keeps having them say that they love each other, but it’s tough to feel. The script makes their relationship out to be little more than a couple of awkward dinners. Christy, on the other hand, is a woman with nothing left to learn, all of her character drama coming from external forces, like her daughter suddenly coming home.
Rather than focus on the characters, or the things they feel, or how they are around each other, the film’s plot largely revolves how difficult it is to run a club, or to be part of a club, or generally how terrible it is to be involved in that world. And it is really, really uninteresting. The film exists in a world of inconsequential privilege that is really difficult to connect to. This is a world where professional failure means getting a day job or getting a book deal. The film plays off losing millions of pesos as little more than a catalyst for some sort of weird lesson. JC learns that he shouldn’t follow his dreams or something like that. It’s really weird.
This is handled with limp direction and subpar acting. Dawn Zulueta mostly acquits herself, in a couple of early scenes where her character basically becomes a schoolgirl again. But even she struggles to make many of these scenes feel anything like real life. She doesn’t share much on screen chemistry with Piolo Pascual. What ought to read as an attraction at times comes off as basic discomfort. And Colleen Garcia is a mess here, but to be completely fair to the actress, her characters gets just one sequence that tries to explain why she’s so terrible, and it’s a terrible scene. I don’t know if anyone could worth with that.
Love Me Tomorrow is a movie that seems to fundamentally misunderstand drama. The drama of this film is all surface: it’s people shedding tears and being angry and contorting their faces. But there is nothing underneath that façade of human emotion. Nothing was built to earn those emotions. People shuffle in and bring new drama, and will most of the time resolve the drama in the very next scene. There is a severe lack of substance underpinning this story, no real human emotion lurking below the contrivances of the narrative. Drama is built from consequence, and the film doesn’t seem to understand what that is.
My Rating:
