Sam is jogging in the street when he bumps into KC and she falls down. Instead of making a fuss, she ignores him, looking like she’s in a trance. They meet again at the Forest Park in Cagayan de Oro. There’s instant attraction then KC suddenly drifts away. They meet again and KC drops the bombshell: she’s terminally ill with stage 4 lymphoma, delivering the meant-to-be classic line “Kaya mo bang mahalin ang isang taong alam mong mawawala sa’yo?” This is reminiscent of Mandy Moore’s line in “A Walk to Remember”: “Don’t fall in love with me.”
This kind of movie is difficult to do as the story about a dying heroine has been done so many times before, from “Sentimental Journey”, “Gift of Love”, “Love Story” and “Autumn in New York” to the more recent “Here on Earth” with Chris Klein and Leelee Sobieski, and “A Walk to Remember” with Mandy Moore and Shane West (whatever happened to him?) In local films, the best example in this genre is “Historia de Un Amor” by Eddie Garcia, with Barbara Perez so touching as the dying girl.
It’s possible to make a good drama using a familiar formulaic story if the characters are well-developed. Unfortunately in “Forever and a Day”, the leads are not really adequately fleshed out. We don’t feel them as real human beings but more as stereotypes. The lead characters are simply not that well defined. Only KC is given some sort of family background. She has adoring supportive parents, Bembol Roco and Vivian Velez, although not for a moment would you believe that the union of Bembol and Vivian would ever produce a fair mestiza girl like KC.
Sam is given no personal back story whatsoever. We just know he’s a cocky asshole who works as a self-centered shoe designer who thinks he can never go wrong. Why he’s behaving like that, we don’t even get a clue. There’s even no hint if they’ve had past relationships before.
Sam looks good on screen, especially in his shorts and sando, but he’s not consistently convincing. He’s actually the lead character in the story as it’s about his transformation from being a colossal asshole to a better person, and also about how he learns a lesson in letting go after KC passes. But it’s either he doesn’t have full understanding of his underwritten role or he’s distracted by delivering all those accented Tagalog lines he’s given in the script. In both instances, we can’t really blame him fully, even for his one-note performance as he goes through the prescribed paces of suffering and longing. KC fares better and plays her emotional scenes well, giving an appealing and heartfelt performance we wish the movie ended her misery earlier.
The movie’s first part is pretty tolerable, especially the Forest Park and white water rafting scenes. The locations are really beautiful, particularly the Tinago Waterfall. But magnificent exterior shots are not enough to compensate for the shortcomings of the material. After KC reveals she’s dying, the movie starts really going downhill and never recovers as scenes continue to get even more and more dragging. It never really succeeds at tugging at our heartstrings and pushing the right buttons to make us weep for KC and Sam, probably because, to begin with, there’s not much sparkling chemistry between them. The romance between them really comes out as contrived and artificial that no matter how hard we try liking it, it fails to truly touch us the way “Love Story” did in 1970 with its very likeable characters.
A plus factor in Molina’s favor is that she spares us the usual maudlin death scene. We think she did this personal film to reflect her own feelings of letting go after the untimely death of her own husband two years ago.
