A Second Chance

A Second Chance opens fresh off the heels of its predecessor One More Chance, where our two leads are heading towards a happily ever after. It's filmed in bright colors; a montage of happy events turns out to be a wedding video. It's giddy and full of the naivete of love, the ultimate distillation of sappiness. Soon after, the palette changes to something more grounded and dreary. Seven years have passed, and in the next two hours or so we will see this naivete crushed by the realities of married life.

There's something interesting about how two people who are completely different build a relationship and eventually, a family. It's easy to fall in love, but it's difficult to stay in love. Many old couples stay together for convenience or for the sake of each other or because of children. Marriages are seldom cakewalks, and the movie does a decent job portraying this.

It also helps that despite its mainstream sensibilities, it doesn't coddle the audience with the notion that these two are perfect, faultless characters.  While I sympathized with Popoy's character in One More Chance, within the confines of married life his flaws take center stage. He becomes suffocating, employing poor managerial skills and being too ambitious for his own good. His fairytale aspirations might have borne fruit anywhere else, but the filmmakers put a stop to his exuberance and bring him down to earth. In this film he is manipulative, passive-aggressive and even a bit egotistical.

Popoy is trapped within the ideals of an antiquated view of marriage, where the man is the sole breadwinner, and any challenge to that status is an affront to his manhood. It takes a number of problems to show that 1) times are changing and 2) you can't run a marriage alone , something that is emphasized with the engineer-architect metaphor in this film. His eagerness to build a family (in Popoy's case, mostly over a pipe dream) and leave it up all to chance is a pitfall, a trap in an socioeconomic environment that leaves no margin for mistakes. And in my personal experience, it is a pitfall many find themselves trapped in. And ironically, with this attitude is a reluctance for change; symbolically represented by his anger at Basha reworking their old home and buying new things.

The tables are turned as the character focus moves to Basha, but this isn't as fully fleshed out as the earlier scenes. It's material worth a whole new movie, so its exclusion is not as important to the overall arc of the story, which focuses on Popoy.

The couple's marital strife stems from a fundamental lack of communication and trust, something that was clearly evident in One More Chance. The film manages to avoid the cliche of making the source of their strife a third party. It is only through establishing clear lines of communication and a bond of trust that the relationship changes (either negatively or positively) in a meaningful way.

Pragmatism replaces idealism and austerity replaces exuberance, a sign of a maturing relationship where temperance and an ability to compromise becomes the priority for both husband and wife. At the same time, it still holds out some notion of idealism (with regards to Popoy's "Project X"), but it is a notion that is now firmly grounded in reality.

And yet, the film is a tribute to the tenacity of love. This is not a movie where love clicks into place, where two people are meant to be with each other. This is not a movie with are bells and whistles in every cute scene, where kilig is pathologic and everything is right with the world. It's a movie where love struggles on despite two people being grossly incompatible with each other, where their flaws stand out instead of their virtues. 

It stands in stark contrast with the standard romantic movie formula and movies that portray the excitement of inexperienced love. Borrowing the movie's own words, if the standard romantic movie was a relationship at its best, this is a relationship at its worst. Isn't that deserving of love as well?