Love; Life's roughness becomes its downfall

So yeah, I'm spoiling the hell out of this movie. Spoiler warning I guess.

It's clear that Love; Life is a bit rough around the edges production-wise. Well, even that's a bit of an understatement. Shots don't match up, the timeline is a bit confusing, and some of the acting leaves much to be desired. It means well, but its storytelling flaws destroy any enjoyment I might've had in watching this disaster.

Most of the story is told as a flashback. When a hotshot music exec (Dino Imperial) learns that his daughter is writing suicidal messages on her notebook, he confronts her and she gets angry at him. This isn't some "life is pain" shit, it's literally "I want to Fucking Die." (The "fucking" is obscured, perhaps to earn a lower MTRCB rating.) He then leaves a video message on his computer, with no indication that his daughter will watch it, that tells the story of... him finding himself?

As it turns out, way back in the past, after a proposal gone wrong, music exec decides to jump off a bridge, where he meets a girl (Sachzna Laparan) who is planning to do the same thing. Calling each other by pseudonyms, the guy (now named Elvis) decides to take the girl (now Madonna) along on a little road trip. Yes, this movie rips off plotlines from other, better movies and does it terribly.

Madonna seems to have a backstory, but since this is viewed through the man's point of view, we don't really know much about her. As for Elvis, "yipes" would be a perfect descriptor of the guy. We see that Elvis' would-be fiancee rejected the proposal for a reason: Elvis is a complete asshole. He's the perfect example of an overdramatic, toxic, insensitive man who treats women as objects of desire that should act according to his whims. He romanticizes these things in his descriptions of his ex, but the flashbacks tell a different story. One would think that by the time he meets Madonna, he's changed for the better, but no, it gets worse. As it turns out, he brought Madonna on his little road trip because he wanted to dress her up in his ex's clothes and take Madonna to all the places where he and his ex spent their time together, all before killing himself.

I don't think I have to say it, but since people can be dense sometimes, THIS PREMISE IS FUCKING MESSED UP. Madonna is horrified to be used this way, and understandably so. She leaves, he follows (? the editing is really bad in this part) and he gets hit by a car.

Unfortunately, he survives, and the first thing he does is hit on his nurse, who becomes the mother to his suicidal child.

The film eventually reunites Elvis and Madonna in an unexpected way, but why should I be rooting for these two? There is no reckoning or indictment of Elvis' actions. He gets away scot free for dragging this poor lady along for the sake of his own self healing. And no wonder the child wants to kill herself, she reads books about men psychologically abusing women to comfort his own hugot. It's fucking ridiculous.

Maybe there is something in this film about loving what life has to offer (...?) But thanks to bad storytelling, it becomes a tale where men can be as assholey as they want while women exist as magical creatures that help solve their problems. It's horrible. But hey, love life!