By Brontë H. Lacsamana, Reporter
Movie Review
My Future You
Directed by Crisanto Aquino
ROMANCE and time travel can make for an interesting blend (think of that old classic Somewhere in Time). And I get it — the cutesy, long-distance flirting that develops into a jittery, slow-burn attraction until the two leads find themselves in a love story that transcends all odds. When well-executed, hopeless romantics will lap it all up.
My Future You follows Karen and Lex, who meet on a dating app, only to discover they’re living 15 years apart, the former in 2024 and the latter in 2009. The mysterious connection was established by a passing comet. As they unravel the mystery of their unique situation, they work together to alter their fates. Time travel works as a fun little plot device for their romance, but unfortunately, it’s been done way better so many times before.
The first good example that comes to mind (its time travel shenanigans are also premeditated by meteorological phenomena) is Your Name, the hit 2016 time-travel anime film by Makoto Shinkai. It’s cheesy, but at least it’s narratively engaging and absolutely beautiful to look at. Most recently (though not many people saw it) was last year’s Summer Metro Manila Film Festival’s Love You Long Time by JP Habac, which had more indie sensibilities suited for Filipino millennial tastes.
My Future You is painfully drawn out, suffering from a similar conundrum as the latter film I mentioned, but even worse. How much pa-cute is too much? How much sentimentality is too much? And do these characters really not know how time travel works? We, as an audience, spend quite a bit of time waiting for the story to get going, for the characters to stop acting all cute and to speed up figuring things out. Its sluggish pace does it no favors.
“Franseth” as a love team is decent. Francine Diaz as Karen and Seth Fedelin as Lex have potential as actors, but ultimately the script and direction called for a disproportionate amount of cutesy and confused moments that outweighed the actual moving of the plot.
(Spoilers ahead.)
Then there’s the ending. The film’s message about each of the leads learning to embrace their non-traditional families — a broken family for Karen and an adoptive family for Lex — had a heartwarming tone that progressed nicely as the story went on. But weighing down that realistic maturing of their characters was the forced, overly romantic ending. Lex approaching the seven-year-old version of Karen, taking a selfie with her, and giving her a pendant added a pedophilic layer to the story that definitely wasn’t needed. It gave him a kind of weird and obsessive slant even though his actions were played as wholesome.
As a vehicle for Franseth to deliver kilig moments to their fans (and to possibly gain new ones), My Future You does its job well. There are sweet moments sprinkled here and there. It simply suffers from the cliches that hamper Filipino romcoms from becoming much better than they could be.
MTRCB Rating: G
