The romance genre in the Philippines has taken a more realistic turn since Antoinette Jadaone’s ‘That Thing Called Tadhana.’ While the kilig is still the driving force that pushes these films, movies like ‘Never Not Love You,’ ‘Sid & Aya: Not a Love Story,’ ‘Alone Together,’ and similar blockbuster films in that same vein has pushed our romantic films towards a more realistic tone: fighting for the belief that one must fix themselves first before one even thinks about pursuing love. 

Petersen Vargas’ ‘Un/Happy for You’ illustrates what happens when one throws themselves into a relationship before they have solidified who they are as a person. It plays off, first as a romantic comedy before shifting gears into a romantic drama as it navigates the truth of the history behind the breakup of the two leads, Juancho and Zy.

The two protagonists meet in Bicol during a chili eating contest. Zy is desperate to join but needed a partner and took with her the first person she saw, which was Juancho. Sparks fly as the heat of the spicy Bicolano food explodes in their mouths and the two share a passionate kiss. Then six years pass, and Juancho is now owner and chef of a popular restaurant in Naga City called Casa Rosa. While inviting a VIP to his restaurant that evening to invest in his expansion to Manila, he sees Zy again after all this time. He decides to invite Zy to the restaurant – in fact, he pretty much forces her to go – despite the fact that it seems they did not break up in the best of terms.

While preparing food for her, we discover that Juancho and Zy broke up two years ago and he has held a grudge for the way that she left him and plans to take his revenge. Zy is in town to research for an article she’s writing about Bicolano food for her writing job in New York. Juancho uses all his connections to make things difficult for her but in the process, his feelings are returning (or have they never left?) and it seems that Zy herself may be feeling the same way.

Vargas excellently uses the film’s tone and aesthetic to amplify the charm of Joshua Garcia and Julia Barretto to its fullest extent. Both actors have such powerful onscreen presence, and they can fill the cinema screen with their charisma. Garcia has that everyman quality while being ridiculously good-looking and Julia Barretto shines and commands attention, her beauty pushing through even though her make-up looks way too heavy in many scenes. There’s an electricity that jumps out of the two when they share scenes together and Vargas is masterful at setting up the camera to highlight this for its full effect. Noel Teehankee’s cinematography helps create the glossy sheen necessary to sell this love story.

But the script by Kookai Labayen, Crystal San Miguel, and Jen Chuaunsu (from a story by Kookai Labayan, Crystal San Miguel, and Simon Lloyd Arciaga) is tricky and clever. At first, Zy is completely framed from Juancho’s perspective so it attempts to justify Juancho’s unfair revenge, but things take a more painful turn when Juancho goes way too far, conflating his feelings of hate and love for Zy, and crossing the line. 

And when the camera switches to show Zy’s side of the story, the film becomes an exploration of the toxic way that many immature people can love and hurt the people they care about the most. Following the trend of the smarter romantic movies that have come out in the past ten or fifteen years, ‘Un/Happy for You’ becomes another reminder that love is not always the answer and that love, when not managed by reason, can be such a destructive force.

With Joshua Garcia as the vessel of this, it softens the blow and gives the audience leeway to be forgiving. But when you take away Petersen Vargas’ excellent use of mainstream film language and the explosive chemistry of Garcia and Barretto, what we have is the story of a very toxic person who manages to ruin people’s lives in the name of love.

Being an ABS-CBN film (co-produced by Viva), there are safe places for these characters to land and so you can expect that the hardships these characters will face will be softer than what they deserve – though, in my opinion, Zy deserves better – but the film needs to be in that mode to catch the audience off-guard so that it can deliver its most striking messages with full impact. It has all the trappings one could ask for in a mainstream romantic movie but there’s a lot more that the film is trying to do underneath and except for the film’s odd final line (that doesn’t quite make sense, when you take into account everything that has happened) the film really hits all the right notes and is another showcase for Joshua Garcia and Julia Barretto’s talents and star power.

My Rating:

Un/Happy for You is now showing! Check showtimes and buy tickets here.