Angelito and I'm Drunk I Love You

Carson (Maja Salvador) is a twentysomething college student. She's at a crossroads in her life, as she is set to finally graduate after seven years of extended study. Her best friend, Dio (Paulo Avelino) invites her over to La Union for a music festival for one last hurrah. But Carson is hiding something from Dio, a secret she's held for seven years. Will she be able to tell him how she feels?

While watching I'm Drunk, I Love You, I couldn't help but draw comparisons to an anime series that I personally love: Honey and Clover. Both deal with a group of college kids ready to set off for the real world, while dealing with their own set of relationship problems. Both feature music as a way of expressing dramatic moments. And, of course, both are ridiculously bittersweet.

I'm Drunk, I Love You isn't just a story about hugot and moving on from love, it's also a story about moving on from a life of youthful abandon to the scary and uncertain future of adulthood. The way the film melds the two together is quite remarkable. It sets the tone with creative framing, production design and a number of love songs by a bunch of indie bands and artists.

Paulo Avelino and Maja Salvador make the movie work, but special mention has to be given to Maja Salvador in this case. She's fantastic. She adds levity when necessary and gravity to each emotional moment; she glances at the target of her affection with longing, her gaze at times tinged with desperation.

Of course, the love aspect of the story is also solid. Anyone who has been in Carson's situation before (like yours truly, though it was three years in my case) can relate to her plight, to every heart crushing moment. A certain breakfast scene is heartbreaking to me, while humorous to the audience at large, because of my experience. Loving someone like that for such a long time isn't easy. These aspects of the story make the film enjoyable at multiple levels, and that's something I really appreciated.

The ending scene of the movie is, literally, 'lights out' - as the notion of Carson and Dio's respective graduations is a graduation from their youth as well. Youth itself is closing shop within these characters' lives. But amidst all that uncertainty is a bit of hope, too, as I get the sense from the end that deep down people stay the same, even though their lives have profoundly changed.

Long story short, this film is one of my favorite local films this year so far. 

this screenshot is from ABS-CBN

Accompanying I'm Drunk, I Love You is Jerrold Tarog's Angelito, a teaser of sorts for Goyo, the sequel to Tarog's 2015 film Heneral Luna. Set shortly after the end of Heneral Luna, it follows the Bernal brothers (Art Acuña and Alex Medina) as they escape from pro-Aguinaldo forces.

The message of the film is quite blunt. There's not a lot of subtext in the dialogue. In a way, the short film may have been aimed at people who had the wrong impressions from Heneral Luna, given that we eventually voted someone that we thought was in Luna's mold into office. It's also a warning against the dangers of co-opting a message or idea, any idea, to serve some partisan political purpose.

The inclusion of the film with I'm Drunk, I Love You is an interesting experiment, with mixed results. It's a tactic that's been tried before, most notably when 20th Century Fox included the trailer for Star Wars Episode I before Meet Joe Black, leading to people paying full price for a ticket, watching the trailer, then leaving. Unless someone takes a survey, we may never know if the strategy was successful in this case. I did notice some people confused by the inclusion of Angelito before the movie, checking their tickets to see if they went into the right moviehouse or not. Further awareness of the film's inclusion may be a good idea.

Anyway, the short itself was enough to build up my hype for the next film in the... uh... HEKASI/Civics Expanded Universe, due 2018.

errata: the trailer for Episode I was appended to Meet Joe Black and not Dreamcatcher. That error has been corrected.