REVIEW: Love is labor in Irene Villamor’s time-shifting romance ‘The Loved One’
Warning: This review contains spoilers.
The films of Irene Villamor default to the requisites of a classic romance, only to slyly invert the very formula that sustains them once the stories arrive at their conclusions. They are depictions of romance in a different light, as a kind of labor where grand gestures and seemingly fated connections, like in-yeon, are still possible but do not necessarily merit the euphoric fantasy of a “happy ending.”
And yet, they are not characteristically hopeless. Villamor’s films shift into a more optimistic register once her “doomed lovers” finally wrap their heads around the idea that there is so much more to gain by letting go. Romance, Villamor argues, is not an end unto itself; baring your soul to someone shouldn’t mean allowing them to completely inhabit who you are.
Her latest, The Loved One, exists in the vein of its predecessors. It’s narratively bittersweet and stylistically subdued, but the first to insist on a black-and-white aesthetic. It’s thematically familiar, but it’s the director’s first dissection of a ten-year relationship. It’s structurally experimental, but instead of merely episodic, like 2018’s Meet Me in St. Gallen, it’s thoroughly fragmented like a memory infused with bokeh. It also involves a brief breaking of the fourth wall, a first for Villamor.
The slippery nature of the film is a doubling down of sorts, the structural flourish mirroring the constricting role time plays in delaying a couple’s grief and acceptance. The Loved One is predicated on the idea that love alone will not endure within the realistic rules of romance, as opposed to Celine Song’s proposition in 2025’s Materialists, with which the film is being tangentially compared.
Before we know it, Ellie and Eric’s relationship has long run its course. We meet the latter in a modest coffee shop in the present day, rendered in monochrome. Played by Jericho Rosales, the seemingly tortured Eric awaits his estranged date’s arrival. She’s apparently stuck in traffic, so he has more time to spare and suffer—the years unforgivingly replaying inside his head, which the film presents to us through a swift and sweeping montage in color, before settling on the exact moment he proposed to her, but we already gathered how that turned out. He still loves her, he says in a text, but she leaves him on read. Near the coda, we’ll glimpse Ellie, played by Anne Curtis, contemplating outside another coffee shop, in tears upon seeing the message. This is the film in a nutshell: A cruel waiting game between the Lover (Eric) and the eponymous Loved One (Ellie). It’s a story about two beautiful souls slowly turning into self-destructing yes people.
It is Eric that assumes the role of de facto narrator, at least until The Loved One shifts vantage points halfway through the story à la Rashomon, though instead of a recollection of a single event through multiple perspectives, the film offers a bifurcated, clashing perspective on a series of events across a decade, allowing it to play a scene and pick it up again and relentlessly replicate the entire gesture to stunning effect, as Benjamin Tolentino’s edit toggles between timeframes in much the same way as we wrestle with the various states of elation, indecision, disappointment, and miscommunication bleeding into one another.
Taking its cue from Roland Barthes’s seminal text Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, Villamor’s supple screenplay intimates Ellie’s refusal to seal the deal. Throughout, she’s been harboring a gut feeling that, despite the ten long years she’s shared with Eric, they won’t survive what awaits them; that they’re simply marching onwards without a real direction. To her, his marriage proposal isn’t a gesture to begin anew but a desperate cry for help. To him, her rejection is emasculating and practically unreasonable.
Eric couldn’t stomach her saying no, having thought years ahead since the start of their relationship, whereas Ellie longs for a deeper purpose. He dismisses her search as a function of her wealthier upbringing rather than an existential crisis, evoked by a condescending tone when she quits her job.
Ellie’s existential dread can be explained by the guilt that gnaws at the courtesy of her class privilege, so much so that she thinks she owes the world for it, be it sorting donations for charitable causes or educating Nepalese kids. Clearly, the pragmatic Eric cares for Ellie, but his continuing paranoia and insecurity (as a consequence of a traumatic past) almost completely belie that intention, which gets more sullied when his officemate Nicole, played by Catriona Gray, enters the picture.
Villamor is obviously enamored with her non-linear schtick, and it’s thanks to this obsession that The Loved One, to some extent, feels like an effective time travel. The two movie stars, in their film reunion following 2008’s Baler, are excellent, portraying two people who can talk with so much affection one moment, then square off verbally like strangers the next. There is a sense that both actors authentically carry some lived experiences into their performances, although Curtis revealed that her portrayal chiefly drew from the Meisner method.
Ellie is decidedly très chic, redolent of Zoe Kravitz, a moodboard for the character. Among the film’s aesthetic delights is seeing Curtis sport Ellie’s varying hairstyles, from a dashing bob to a neat ponytail, and slip into her sleek outfits, from the cobalt blue dress at the wedding reception to the luminous, wine-red piece featured in the proposal scene. Such vibrant colors are deliberately stylized in the Jean-Luc Godard tradition and against the film’s rather muted palette of brown, white, and pale blue.
Cinematographer Pao Orendain, utilizing a mix of locked-down and moving setups, shoots Curtis in a manner that renders her beauty as aesthetically additive, giving Ellie a kind of enigmatic allure, though she’s far from an opaque character.
But the film’s most impressive vista arrives when it pulls off the shot-reverse shot of the future lovers exchanging charged, glowing glances after running into each other at the post-wedding ceremony; here, the sequencing starts and eventually settles on Rosales’s smitten face. In the black-and-white present, when the two meet again at the coffee shop, the film repeats the technique just as the story introduces Ellie’s point of view, and the edit now begins and ends on Curtis’s pained visage, all signs of love visibly snuffed out. This simple parallel aimed at conveying the immeasurable gulf between the central couple has rarely been so emotionally decimating. (I think of Nerisa del Carmen Guevara’s classic poem “Tremors”.)
Villamor’s compositions here hew closer to Sid and Aya, sans the luxury of a cold foreign city to embody the narrative’s wistful pathos. The director and her frequent cinematographer shoot Manila with equal romance and indifference, careful not to anonymize the metropolis and therefore demonstrating a control of mood and imagery that, all previous sights considered, is the duo’s best.
Villamor’s dialogue is lively, textured, and filled with dialectical heft, giving us access to who these characters are by discussing their desires, their tastes, their quirks, their politics, and their priorities. Never mind the occasional pleading for remembrance, lines potent for the film’s marketing: “Dahil ako ang mas nagmahal, ako ang laging naghihintay” (a direct nod to Barthes); “Love turns ordinary people into poets, philosophers, and monsters.”
My favorite line is deceptively simple: “When I’m with you, I feel sad,” Ellie tells Eric, after turning down his proposal. It’s a classically bittersweet line, intense and honest and painful. It recalls the crushing mundanity of Celeste’s last few lines at the end of St. Gallen: “Baka ganito talaga tayo, dumadaan lang… Baka dumating tayo para bigyan ng kaunting buhay and buhay.”
What’s always fascinating about Villamor is that she never writes her women as damsels in distress. The movie is a profound journey back to oneself as much as it is a wide-reaching story of two people coming to terms with the insufficiency of their enormous love for each other. From here, it’s clear that The Loved One could not have ended any differently.
Despite constantly citing formative philosophical knowledge in her films, either tastefully or awkwardly, Villamor never passes off her evolving takes on romance as eons-enduring morsels of insight, but she always manages to translate them onscreen in a way that never feels passé.
Love, the film suggests, is holistic labor. The sort of thing that’s almost impossible to figure out without feeling like you’re slowly losing your sense of self. It’s altogether scary, rewarding, and exhausting. There is a messy beauty in that risk, the film asserts, before conceding that you can only risk so much. Arriving at the coda, Villamor invokes her gentlest gesture and spares both her former lovers, like those who have come before them, offering us a more concrete and constructive notion of romance and therefore sustaining the filmmaker’s hallmark identity.
While last year’s Only We Know remains as Villamor’s most mature work, The Loved One is her most fluid and cohesive in terms of form and narrative, one that still refuses to neatly punctuate its proceedings. It’s introspective and infinitely poignant, powered by an adequate conception of cinematic time.