Director Laurice Guillen with the cast of ‘I Love You, Goodbye’

We have such high hopes for “I Love You, Goodbye” as it’s the directorial comeback of Laurice Guillen whose “Tanging Yaman” was a big winner in the Metro Manila Film Fest before. As Laurice herself told us when we interviewed her for the film, this is a love drama. We want to warn you right here that there will be spoilers in this review, so if you have intentions of watching the film, we advise you to stop reading and just read this review again after you’ve seen it.

The lead character is Lizelle (Angelica Panganiban). When the film opens, she’s already living in with a much older doctor, Adrian (Gabby Concepcion), whom she met while she was working as a waitress in a coffee shop. A friend (Matet de Leon) tells her that her ex-boyfriend, Gary (Derek Ramsay), is back in town and looking for her. But she’s not interested in seeing him again. She gets surprised when Adrian’s daughter from his failed marriage, Issa (Kim Chiu), invites a friend for dinner to their home and it turns out to be Gary, who tries his best to make amends with her but she rejects him.

In flashback, we learn that they used to live together and planned to work in a cruise ship to help them have a better future. But Lizelle got scared in the test where she’s required to jump into the sea and didn’t make it. Gary left her without saying goodbye. He now says he has realized how much he loves her and wants her back, but she wants to stay faithful to Adrian even if Issa and Adrian’s snooty mom (Liza Lorena) treat her like dirt, and she’s so wimpy that she doesn’t even try to fight back.

The story becomes so contrived when Adrian gets suspended after a patient of his dies and he refuses to share his personal problems with Lizelle. He goes to Singapore alone and, Lizelle, feeling left out, joins her friends to a trip to Ilocos where it turns out that Gary is a part of the group. This is an obvious plot engineered to bring Lizelle and Gary back together. And that’s exactly what happens.

Magically, when Adrian returns, he tells Lizelle that all his troubles have been solved and asks for her forgiveness for distancing himself from her. But Lizelle had already made arrangements to go away with Gary and she waits for him patiently in a bus station. He doesn’t show up. Up to this point, the film is treated as a serious drama about relationships. But when Gary fails to show up, the film suddenly crumbles and becomes a mystery. The information about what happened to him is deliberately withheld from the audience for no other reason than to give the movie a cheap twist later.

Lizelle accepts Adrian’s offer of marriage and prepares for their wedding. Then, all of a sudden, a man appears to her to tell her she’s Gary’s beneficiary in his insurance. She finds out he’s dead. This is hard to accept. How come no one among their concerned friends inform her about what happened to Gary? As a woman behind us commented: “Imposible namang hindi niya mabalitaan ang ganung pangyayari.”

And even more unbelievable is an insurance agency seeking the beneficiary of someone who died. This was also used in “Mano Po 6” when Sharon Cuneta’s mom died and she’s suddenly presented by the insurance agency with a P10 million check. Our wife was insured in three different companies when she abruptly left us and we tell you, getting insurance money is a long and tedious process. You have to apply as the beneficiary and they require you to submit so many papers before your application can be processed.

At this point, whatever hopes we have for the film to be better than average has been dashed to pieces. All the more so when, at the film’s epilogue, Kim and Liza suddenly made a 360-turn around and, from being mean bitches, they suddenly become so sweet and accommodating to Angelica without any explanation whatsoever. Talk about believable character motivations. We know Star Cinema has an execom that supervises their films. How come they didn’t see at all these films’ egregious mistakes?

We’re afraid even the acting is nothing outstanding. No matter how good the actors are, they can never rise beyond the poor limitations of the material. All Angelica does is cry in every other scene, even when she’s no longer required to shed tears and some quiet underplaying would have been more effective. In the end, we gladly said goodbye to the movie without ever feeling that we loved it one bit.