When love falls short of ‘forever’

CRUZ and Alonzo in “A Second Chance”

As I was watching Cathy Garcia-Molina’s hit film “A Second Chance,” I appreciated its many obvious virtues: It featured standout actors John Lloyd Cruz and Bea Alonzo; it was a realistic view of a Filipino marriage, seven long and turbulent years after the “idealizing” “I do’s” were first breathlessly exchanged, and some of its dramatic confrontations crackled and stung with visceral pain, anger and hate.

How can two people who’ve pledged to love each other “forevermore” feel anger and even hatred for one another? Oh, but they can—and do—as some or even many “marriage-wounded” and “-scarred” couples will attest.

So, kudos to the film for being one of the few loyal productions to not paint a perfect and perfectly deceptive picture of “love eternal!”

But, after viewing the film, there were some elements that I had to review and reconsider, because they were getting in the way of my “totalized” view of the film: To begin with, its “confrontation” scenes were indeed acutely felt and “painfully” performed—but there were simply too many of them, so they eventually began to “echo” one another.

In addition, there were too many intentionally quotable “hugot” lines, witty or wry observations about love and life that viewers here really dote on, but ended up compromising the reality of the shared emotional experience.

Of course, some people will take umbrage at this “party-pooper” comment, because it’s precisely for those quotable hugot lines that they watch rom-com dramas these days.

Fact is, however, if you line up a whole lot of those clever stingers and zingers one after another, they do get in the way.

A more significant problem is the film’s point of view, which is canted heavily in favor of its female protagonist—while the guy is the one with decidedly more of the character flaws that create the bulk of the story’s key issues and conflicts.

Yes, guys can be such schmucks, but must they be cast as the fall guys so often, and so conveniently?

A more balanced attribution of flaws and responsibilities would have made the dramatic experience more helpfully fair, beyond playing local cinema’s usual blame game.

The way the film sees its resident couple’s woes, it’s John Lloyd’s character who’s “guilty” (he’s in denial, postpones decisions and solutions until it’s too late and has thus become a big failure)—while she’s “forced” to embarrass him further by having to step in—and pick up his pieces.

Finally, we admire the two leads’ “proven” thespic talent, but their confrontation scenes here are so repetitive that their performances stop short of being truly memorable.

Their best “shared” scene is the one in which his character feelingly and bitterly admits that he’s a first-class loser and she feels even worse because she can’t contradict him!

Bea and John Lloyd do hit that scene out of the ballpark, but most of their other “moments,” while being competently performed, don’t quite hit viewers where they live—and have a hard time breathing.

All told, however, “A Second Chance” winningly deserves our gratitude and viewership—for facing love in its face and finding it flawed and less long-lived as “forever.”

Its follow-up insight is even more powerful: Even love bereft and betrayed can be restored and redeemed if both spouses struggle to face up to and rise above their limitations—which is much more difficult than breathlessly, beatifically, blissfully saying “I do!”