Dear Other Self, or: for want of a nail, consequence was lost

Dear Other Self owes a lot to the 1998 film Sliding Doors, where the simple act of missing a train leads to two wildly diverging timelines. In this case, it's a bunch of noisy neighbors that cause protagonist Rebecca (Jodi Sta. Maria) to either lose sleep or sleep soundly. The sequence of events that follow lead to her either staying at her job or leaving her job to pursue her dreams of traveling the world.

The premise sounds interesting on paper, but ultimately Dear Other Self disappointed me. Neither of the two timelines made an impact on me, and to be honest they could be interchangeable. There is no real consequence to Rebecca's actions; and any sort of dramatic tension is handwaved away for the sake of a convenient ending. These sorts of movies thrive with experimentation; the fact that the movie mostly played it safe ultimately doomed the whole enterprise. The movie has the opportunity to show us how fate can be capricious, such as how Sliding Doors ended, or (to take it to extremes) how this divergence can affect our entire worldview and political standing, such as in Kieslowski's 1988 film Blind Chance. But it doesn't really do that; I felt that the film didn't take any risks, and removed the consequence of that choice. Without consequence, the stories of Dear Other Self aren't really that compelling.

On the other hand, the film tries to explore the dichotomy of either living for one's self or for family. Rebecca experiences both alternatives through both timelines. While the absence of consequence again makes the eventual outcomes of both stories pretty much irrelevant, the film posits some interesting questions. Rebecca's travel is done mostly at her own expense, but as the breadwinner it may come off as selfish, especially within the context of Filipino culture and ideas of filial devotion. On the other hand, being the breadwinner in the first place can be seen as unfair to Rebecca, who is unable to reach her own dreams. To its credit, the film has a number of solutions to this problem in surprising ways.

In closing, I feel I've been too hard on the film, perhaps due to expectations that were too high. While it does have a number of interesting ideas, the film's subservience to convention ultimately makes it an inferior movie. And while it may be a step in the right direction, during this movie, sometimes I wished I was in a parallel universe, watching a movie that had a little bit more ambition behind its promising ideas.