‘Till My Heartaches End’ Common plot, cliché situations

by Nickie Wang

Till My Heartaches End is the fifth movie with Gerald Anderson and Kim Chiu. It affirms their status onscreen as a love team to beat. As the third movie featuring the Kimerald tandem, it is so far the tandem’s best project. The movie marks the love team’s transition from teenybops to mature individuals. With their separate goals as actors, will it mean that it is going to be their last team up?

The romantic drama is just one of the big screen productions written and directed by Jose Javier Reyes that conforms to the mantra ‘play it safe.’ The plot is an ordinary tale of love narrated in an ordinary fashion. Indeed, the possibility of creating an unconventional love story was not explored. Nonetheless, it is an interesting movie because it does not follow the overused formula that ends the whole movie on a positive note, but of course it still depends on how the viewers interpret separation.

Till My Heartaches End is a fairytale-inspired movie only that goes the other way around: they lived happily [ever after], once upon a time.

The romance of Paolo “Powie” Barredo (Gerald Anderson) and Agnes Garcia (Kim Chiu) blossoms in a coffee shop, which is also the very same place where their love story end. The opening scene is the same stage that leads to their breakup. In the middle of these two interconnected scenes are narrations on how they start living a life together and what unfortunate circumstances make them decide to call it quits.

Powie has a very dynamic personality and Agnes, a timid and modest girl from the province, is just the complete opposite. They both believe that destiny brings them together until Powie realises his dream. He succeeds in his chosen field.

When Agnes met Powie, he was just a plain service crew working in the said café. As a son born out of wed lock, Powie strives to live an independent life. He becomes a successful property consultant and one of the best in the real estate company he is working for.

With a well-stuffed wallet and a changed environment, Powie loses interest in his devoted girlfriend. He then forgets the love he promised to stay forever (very cliché isn’t it?).

There is no too much conflict in the movie since the story revolves around why Powie becomes distant from Agnes, who on the other hand, puts her boyfriend at the center of her universe. Amid running for almost two hours, the movie does not allot enough space for character development. Until the closing credits, the lead characters remain suspended with their suppressed emotions.

Since Powie and Agnes are the focus of the movie, the supporting characters stay merely on the backdrop. Surprisingly, Reyes didn’t give them enough film time to upstage Kimerald.

Just like every Reyes movie, each scene is rich in dialogue, and at times are amass in lines that you have already heard from other movies of the same genre.

Despite the flaws that are endemic to local movies, the movie is interesting. It has an ordinary story line, which ordinary people can easily relate to.

Songs and the movies

Most songs are written typically to tell a story and evoke emotions. There are songs specifically made as background in a motion picture though not stretched further to get the audience distracted from the story line.

Till My Heartaches End is just one of the six releases this year, and one of the more than 30 motion pictures released from 2000 to 2010 by Star Cinema that borrowed its title from a song. Star Cinema, and other production houses for that matter, never get tired of using song titles and or lines from a song to name its movies. Can we call it complacency or is it the same way to say that they have already exhausted their creative juices?

Previously, OPM songs were the favorite titles to local movies, but after the 1997 romantic-drama Fools Rush In (starring Matthew Perry and Salma Hayek) endeared moviegoers, local productions started using song titles as movie titles, despite not being able to justify the relation between the song and the movie itself.

Box office hit

Based on the website of the  third party tabulator Box Office Mojo, a subsidiary of Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Kimerald’s romantic film bested four Hollywood films (The Social Network, Paranormal Activity 2, My Soul To Take, and Buried) that also premiered from Oct. 27 to 31. It topped the weekend box office notching P33.02 million in over 70 screens nationwide.

Meanwhile, previous box office winner Petrang Kabayo settled for the second spot with an additional P14.06M. The fantasy-comedy finally breached the 100-million mark with its three-week cumulative ticket sales of P100.92 M.

Regal Films’ Halloween offering White House suffered ticket sales decline earning just over P5 M during the same period. It is still enough though to place fifth. After two weeks, the horror flick  grossed P17.75M. Meanwhile, critically-acclaimed The Social Network landed at no. 3 with P 8.24 M, and Paranormal Activity 2 at no.4 raking P7.5 M.

Gerald and Bea split up

The success of Till My Heartaches Ends is relevant only as the movie circles continue to talk about the rumored Gerald Anderson and Bea Alonzo break up. If it were true, thank God their fans still wish they’d be back in each others arms, otherwise, as on tabloid writer would put it, “pupulutin mo na lang sila sa kangkungan” (you’ll find the two in a marsh cabbage farm).

Gerald and Bea put a period to their affair in the same concert tour (Heartthrobs Concert Tour) where their romance started. Although both parties have been denying their romantic involvement, showbiz insiders and people around them can’t deny the relationship that lasted seven months.

In September, at the press conference of Till My Heartaches End, Gerald denied wooing the Magkaribal star. He was not lying, they were already an item so it’s just right to deny the hearsay.