Hello, Love, Again

♣♣♣♣/♣♣♣♣♣

Joy (Kathryn Bernardo) follows through with her plan to move to Canada where she takes on several odd jobs to survive. Maintaining a long distance relationship with Ethan (Alden Richards) on the other side of the world is difficult, so he decides to apply for a Canadian visa and try his luck there with her by his side. Things go smoothly in the beginning until the COVID pandemic strikes. Not ready for menial jobs he finds to be beneath him, Ethan is distraught, and his anguish takes a turn for the worse when his father gets infected and passes away before he can make it back home to Hong Kong. The two call it quits and go their separate ways. Fast forward four years later, Ethan is back in Calgary. Having lost everything including his bar, he gives Canada another go not particularly to win Joy back but rather to fix his own life.

Released in 2019, Hello, Love, Goodbye was doomed by some to fail because neither actor was starring with their perennial onscreen partners that made them bankable. The film went on to gross a total of 880 million pesos, becoming the highest grossing Filipino film of all time until Rewind broke the record just in January this year, five years later. Not coming up with a sequel is stupid, from a producer’s point of view. Imagine the cash grab, bruh? For us moviegoers, though, the main concern is that they’d just change venues and rehash the storyline of the first movie to come up with this sequel, which is what they actually end up doing.

And they changed the ending, too, which is just proper because this sequel would’ve been pointless otherwise. They could have opted to continue the trend and make this a trilogy. I mean, in the first film both Joy and Ethan were in Hong Kong but she was moving to Canada. In this film both of them are in Canada but she is moving to the US. A threequel could have both of them in the US but she’d be moving to Timbuktu this time around. In fact, they could just do that until both actors are 90. Heck, there are almost 200 countries in the world to choose from, you know. But they didn’t, and for that we are grateful.

It’s not that we don’t want a sequel. The first film just really did a good job in coming up with an ending that was unconventional and open-ended, a little bit too realistic but well-appreciated. Whatever happens to Ethan and Joy afterwards could’ve been left to the imagination. That way, you include the moviegoer in the storytelling process. Hello, Love, Again is simply a logical continuation to the story. You can even watch both back to back and realize in the end that you just watched a four-hour long film. What you’d eventually notice, though, would be the repetitiveness of some plot points, recycled as they are.

The first film also stood out for having a more mature tone. After all, it was a project seen to be an effort of two actors to break free from the prohibitive love-team mold that had defined their respective careers up to that point. Hello, Love, Goodbye followed the time-tested Star Cinema formula, bur veered more towards the nitty-gritty of OFW life in Hong Kong. Yes, it was teenybopper at some points, but arguably mature in most others. Hello, Love, Again is a Star Cinema rom-com through and through, following that formula to a tee, from the way the love scene after a big argument was filmed all the way to the airport detour in the end.

Another funny thing is how this movie came across like some sort of Immigrating to Canada for Filipinos 101. They explore all the options from the popular student visa to work permit path, the Lonely Canadian program, all the way to the faster Marry a PR for a PR route. This is nothing new because the first film also delved deep into the specifics of being an OFW in Hong Kong, but this whole Canada immigration subplot in this sequel just feels too in-your-face that it ends up a bit hilarious, akin to those immigration tutorials on YouTube.

In any case, another sequel is now less likely because of how the plot wrapped up. Thank goodness, no? If you are a fan of this love team or just the story of the first movie, then Hello, Love, Again does you a favor by spelling out for you whatever ending for Hello, Love, Goodbye that you might have already conjured in your brain. It works as a good closure and happy goodbye to Joy and Ethan. Perhaps we can say that this is mere fan service after all, but maybe we can use some happy endings once in a while.