Second Chances and Starting Over - A Review of Antoinette Jadaone's "Alone/Together"

Antoinette Jadaone has a long resume, both as a writer and director. It’s been largely output with one note, churning out multiple consecutive romance films since 2014.

“Alone/Together” begins with a series of terrible missteps. The opening scene has the main character, Christine (Liza Soberano) lecturing tour groups in front of the historic Juan Luna piece “Spoliarium”. She immediately begins to lecture the tour group, a proxy for the movie audience, on the importance of history and how it’s important to study it and not repeat mistakes of the past. Strike one. She then engages a bystander, Raf (Enrique Gil), at length on the accuracy of the spelling of a song title that just so happens to take its name from the Luna painting. Strike two. To prove his point, Raf leaves her a CD, which she proceeds to load into her handy portable CD player. The scene is set in 2012, ten years after the release of the Apple iPod. Strike three. The next scene has her talking to a professor, who then lectures her (the audience) on the responsibility of Filipinos serving the country and not going abroad permanently. Strike four.

Preaching is a fatal flaw of Filipino cinema. There seems to frequently be this need of filmmakers to explicitly write a moral or lesson into their screenplay, and then proceed to hammer the viewers over the head with it. It’s terrible writing and film-making, and “Alone/Together” almost lost me in the first fifteen minutes with this series of anvils dropped on our collective heads. Someone should have thrown themselves in front of this and gotten the whole sequence edited out. Just tell the story, most of us are smart enough to figure out what you’re trying to say on our own without the heavy-handedness.

Thankfully it gets better. The story actually starts with Christine, a decorated Art Studies graduate, making a professional mistake in her first job and getting herself entangled in a fraud case. This makes her a pariah in the “small art circles” of the country, and she feels her career and life, are over age twenty-two. She is “saved” by Greg (Luis Alandy) who not only gives her a job despite the black mark on her resume, he also becomes her boyfriend. Christine, who before the job incident was in a relationship with Raf, abandons both him and her connection to art to hide and feel sorry for herself for five years.

Fast forward to 2017. Christine is successful at her career under Greg. By chance she meets Raf again, who has since gotten his medical degree and entered into a relationship with Aya (Jasmine Curtis-Smith). Seeing Christine rekindles his passion for her, and he begins to pursue her relentlessly. (You wonder why he stayed away the last five years. Christine lives in the same place that she did five years ago. But this is Christine’s story, not his.)

This culminates with Raf convincing Christine to take a business trip to New York City, where her dreams of visiting the art meccas lay dormant since the fraud incident. He follows her to NYC, where they spend three days making the rounds of the museums and rekindling Christine’s passion for the craft. Raf hopes that this would also be enough to restore Christine’s feelings for him. He’s both right and wrong. She kisses him, but quickly recoils and denies her own feelings. They return to the Philippines, with Raf devastated and Christine confused.

Ultimately the trip gives Christine the courage to decide that the art world is where she belongs, and that she’s willing to do whatever it takes to return, even if it means starting over. She dumps Greg when he’s not supportive, saying that over the last five years she built her life and career around him, and that she needed to go find herself again. She gets on the job-seeking treadmill and endures until she gets a second chance at her dream career. Christine goes back to Raf to thank him, but he rejects her, and says that Aya is pregnant with his baby. Christine wishes him well and leaves. The movie ends with Christine saying in a narration that she wishes she could tell the audience that she and Raf worked out, but they didn’t and that she was at peace with it.

But wait, there’s more. The movie doesn’t end there. Christine is shown at an awards ceremony, where an artist that she encountered during her New York trip credits her with inspiring a return to the Philippines to find her audience. Afterwards, Christine leaves the venue and finds Raf waiting for her. Raf says that he and Aya didn’t work out, but he plans to be the best father that he can be. Christine and Raf reconcile. The final scene has Raf, Christine and Raf’s child in front of the Spoliarium, bringing the story full circle.

Talk about damaging a film by adding three more scenes. The natural end was Christine building her own life and career independently. She just said that she made a mistake in having her life revolve around a man. Having her do it again at the end of the film feels wrong considering the character’s arc. It was already damaging that Greg was written like a one-dimensional cardboard cutout, a man only concerned with work and with no empathy for both the woman that he’s supposed to be in love with, and his own young daughter from a previous marriage. The character rings false, and is nothing but a foil for Raf. It unfortunate, because a multi-dimensional Greg that’s at least a reasonable character that Christine had real reason to fall in love with would provide greater texture to situation. It’s the only other important human relationship in the film and there was no care in its construction and presentation.

The other reason that the last scenes should have been excised is that Raf is a black box. This isn’t his story. His background, particularly his medical career and relationship with Aya was abstracted. Having him make a major leap from being devastated that Christine rejected him and having a child with the girlfriend he broke up with to chase his ex, to going back to Christine with a big smile on his face strains the credibility of the character. Raf’s role was to reconnect Christine with herself and her dreams. Re-injecting himself into the equation weakens Christine’s recovery and overall story arc.

Ultimately, the poor beginning and ending detract from competent storytelling by Jadaone and Soberano. The core character arc of Christine is told honestly by the director, and conveyed with surprising deftness by the actress. The New York sequence was engaging if you ignore Raf magically appearing without explanation. The shots, while unremarkable, are sufficient to convey Christine’s world. Shooting Christine’s scenes with Raf largely outdoors, and those with Greg indoors, convey the freedom versus the claustrophobia that those characters and relationships represent in her life. 

Soberano has developed acting range, and turned in a largely authentic performance. In the instances where Christine responds with momentary silence, she is able to convey emotions that go beyond words. She leverages her expressive eyes to hold the viewer’s attention. The subtle changes in her expression tell you what she’s feeling before she speaks. You can’t ask for much more from a young actor in the Philippine movie scene, which is littered with an abundance of wooden faces.

Gil does not fare as well. He vacillates between exuberance, sadness and occasional anger with little in the way of nuance or shading. Gil's portrayal of Raf is heavily reliant on his dialogue, and even that is delivered with limited dimension. It all feels like forced performance rather than a full-formed character.

In the final accounting, “Alone/Together” is a worthwhile experience. For want of an editor with the insight and courage to tighten the film, it underachieves, but with patience you can see the outlines of a good film. It is miscast as a romance, and is more of a character study of Christine. The arc of failure, depression, realization and recovery is powerful, and is a story that many people can relate to. It is encouraging to see the best parts of this movie deliver on that tale. It provides hope that subsequent outings from Jadaone can take those last steps towards crafting a film that avoids the usual pitfalls and delivers on the promise that the core scenes of “Alone/Together” exhibit.

David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook (3/4 stars)

Very late to the party but finally saw David Russell's Silver Linings Playbook from 2012. I went in blind (didn't know anything about the story), only that J-Law was good enough to win the Oscar. Was treated to a relatively simple story that was a rather delicate treatment of a mix of mental illness, drama and romance. Totally character driven - Lawrence, Cooper, DeNiro and Weaver made this show go. In the end, while the plot was full of holes, the characters allowed suspension of disbelief. That was enough.

I'll never get tired of J-Law I think. She's pretty much surpassed Scarlett and Nat in my girls that can act book (not that the other two have done much... I dread Under the Skin to attempt it for now).

Chris Nolan's Inception (2.5/4 stars)

Director Christopher Nolan's career was built on his mind-bending thriller Memento, a film that was a near-perfect blend of atmosphere, pacing, character evolution and time-twisting. His latest film, Inception hearkens back to many of the same elements. In this reality, dreams are a place that can be controlled by the dreamer, and others can come into the dream and interact with it as if it was the real world.

Nolan's cast includes Academy Award winners Leo diCaprio (as the lead character Cobb) and Ken Watanabe, and Academy Award nominee Ellen Page. Sadly, the film's structure and the ensemble nature of the roles end up diluting any character work that the three heavyweights attempt. (You can tell they were trying tho.) The film's focus is on keeping the audience aboard the barreling freight train that is the second half of the film.

The second half of the film involves layering four different timeframes/realities on top of each other, trying to give all the characters some gravitas while advancing the increasingly complex plot events. The weak link in the storytelling is a key subplot involving Cobb and his wife. The subplot is the cog that explains the whole Inception mechanism that's driving the film, but it's also the squeaky gear that's throwing the pacing off-tangent. The lulls that allow for Cobb's explanatory dialogue with Page's disingenuously-named character Ariadne downshift the movie at inopportune times. Ironically, Ariadne's role in Cobb's team is that of an "architect" which is the namesake of the character that brought The Matrix Reloaded to a screeching, soul-crushingly laughable halt.

This approach is far more audience-friendly than Memento's figure-it-out-yourself philosophy. That's not necessarily bad since your average filmgoer will probably be hard-pressed to explain exactly what's going on despite the decision to maintain a mostly-linear progression to the movie's events. People might be more likely to appreciate the effects, which are mostly comparable to the old Matrix mainstays (shattering cities and slow-mo low-gravity melee combat). I suppose that Nolan wanted it to be more Dark Knight than Memento, but I would argue that this did the film a disservice from an artistic standpoint while trying to give it more commercial oomph.

To those who are raving about the ending: get a grip. It's not really relevant whether the bronze top focus stopped spinning or not.

Bottom Line: Inception isn't Nolan's best work, and it wastes DiCaprio, Watanabe and Page. However it's still an intelligent film that is diminished by decisions to make it more commercial appeal. That doesn't make it bad, and it's still well worth the time to go see.

Iiiiiiii'mmmmm baaaaaack

Wow. Four years. That was a long time ago.

More Super Heroes: Iron Man

Today's moviemaking magic makes it a snap to bring Tony Stark and Iron Man to the big screen. Nice teaser poster, but 2008 is a long ways away.