The New York Asian Film Festival took place between June 29 and July 15 in Manhattan. For more information about films and events, click here.
Strangely few filmmakers think of the romantic genre as the risky venture it is, and that puzzles me sometimes.
Think about it: we, as humans living in a civilization, rarely if ever have to deal with being invaded by marauding lizard aliens, or terrorists taking us hostage in an elaborate scheme to steal billions of dollars worth of bearer bonds. And tragically few of us will ever get to see a dog win the World Series.
But whether it’s requited or unrequited, passionate or doomed… we’ve all known romance.
It’s the one situation almost literally every human being on Earth experiences in one form or another, the thing we all have a very personal, very intimate experience with. Which makes it all the easier to call bullshit on these films. We’ve had the experiences, we all know that what shows up on the big screen is all make believe.
And yet, people still eat them up with a spoon.
It seems like a big risk, but the secret to its success is that we’re all suckers for the fantasy. Just like with Sad Beauty, another feature that made its debut during the festival, if the chemistry between two performers is good enough that we buy their relationship, then we’re generally willing to buy anything else that happens.
Chemistry is funny like that.
Which is a roundabout way of saying that “love story” or not, I simply didn’t buy the relationship between Sid and Aya (and the title characters’ closeness to Sid and Nancy namewise has to be some kind of misfired meta joke). And as a result, I couldn’t buy into the film itself.
It’s a curious thing indeed when good performances, interesting themes, and a loving glimpse of the Philippines that outsiders don’t get to see ultimately fail to cohere.
Sid, our leading man played by the perfectly named Dingdong Dantes, is a stock broker who sees people as assets and is (perhaps relatedly) troubled by insomnia. He spends his long, sleepless nights at a 24-hour coffee bar staffed by (among others) Aya, the playfully pragmatic beauty that arouses Sid’s curiosity.
Their relationship, which begins in a transactional matter, continues in that vein as, impressed by her direct nature, he hires her to keep him (stipulated platonic) company during his nightly bouts. Of course, he already has a girlfriend, and Aya is only in it for the money. But as Aya’s charges rise and rise, so do the emotional stakes…
Perhaps the best thing that can be said for Dantes is that he makes his baron of finance much more empathetic than one might think. The script throws everything it can think of at him to make him come off as an asshole.
I mean, come on: it gives him a self-pitying voice over; it gives him a damaged “dead parents” background to justify his antisocial tendencies; it gives him a beautiful, charming girlfriend about whom he’s weirdly ambivalent; he has sweet abs… it’s almost everything you hate about that one guy at your gym, rolled into one package.
And that’s before he literally starts buying the time of a woman operating about two social classes under him.
So the fact that he merely comes off as a bit of a jackass is a credit to Dantes’ inherent charisma.
But, as is generally the case in matters of filmic romance, it’s the female lead that truly captivates.
Anne Curtis, cutting a very, very different figure than her role in closing night Buybust, invests her performance with both an abundance of winsome charm and a certain spikiness that keeps her from coming off as cloying. “Talent’s all I’ve got,” she remarks in passing,
The movie is for all intents and purposes a two hander, but a special shout-out is in order for Gabby Eigenmann as Darren, Sid’s douche-tastic boss who inexplicably seems to have honed in on his performance by just nailing a spot-on imitation of Brett Ratner.
But maybe the biggest failing is that it’s not so subversive as its best lines of dialogue would have you believe. In its beats and in its particulars, it all still feels a bit familiar.
Just as name checking Pretty Woman doesn’t absolve you of lifting its basic conceit, neither does saying you’re not a love story when pretty much everything that happens is straight out of the romantic drama playbook.
Sid and Aya: Not a Love Story is a noble attempt to do something different with the romantic drama, and as such it has its virtues, such as dynamic performers in Dantes and Curtis and some arresting images of the urban Philippines nightlife that rarely get highlighted internationally. But at the end of the day, all its good intentions are unable to escape the gravity of the clichés that it was built on.
