‘ONE TRUE LOVES’ is a rom-com based on a novel made popular by Booktok, a Tiktok arm for book lovers who love literature.
This is where hit books turned hit movies “Heartstopper” and “Where the Crawdads Sing” first gained fame.
“One True Loves” is by Taylor Jenkins Reid, considered the Queen of Booktok after her other novels, “Daisy Jones and the Six” and “The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” also hit it big.
The film version stars two Asians: Phillipa Soo, a Broadway star best known for “Hamliton”, and Simu Liu, best known for the worldwide hit, “Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”.
The film’s main premise is whether it is possible for you to love two different persons at the same.
In other words, having two true loves. This is something we’ve seen before locally in “Una Kang Naging Akin”. Doris Day also has a movie like this in the 60s, “Move Over, Darling”.
The film is not told in a linear manner but runs back and forth in time. It starts when the three characters are still teenagers.
Then jumps to the time Philippa as Emma, a travel writer, is already happily married to Jesse (Luke Bracey, the Aussie actor who played Elvis Presley’s friend-manager in “Elvis”), a photographer.
They share the same love for travel and adventure. It seems like they’d be together forever.
Then one day, as they celebrate their first wedding anniversary, Jesse suddenly disappears in a helicopter crash while on a photographic assignment somewhere in the Pacific.
He is presumed dead. Emma is crushed but she has to move on.
Emma leaves their home in California and moves back to her family in Massachusetts to help manage their family’s book store.
Four years later, she meets again her high school best friend, Sam (Simu), now a music teacher in a local school, and romance blooms between them.
They get engaged and are about to marry when Emma’s world is shaken when she suddenly gets a call from Jesse.
He turns out to be alive and is living on a deserted island where he was finally rescued after four long years.
Emma is now faced with the dilemma of making a decision: which one among the two guys is her one true love?
We are sure some viewers will have empathy for Emma’s plight: who will she choose between her long lost husband and her current loving fiance?
Although the material is not really new, the three lead actors manage to elevate the material.
Luke Bracey as Jesse, the athletic golden boy, is quite charming and endearing. You can feel that he really loves Emma.
But Simu Liu is more adorable as the hunky teacher who’s been in love with Emma since they were kids but never got the courage to woo her.
Now that he might lose her again, it’s natural for him to feel insecure that he might be friendzoned again, since he doesn’t seem to have the self assurance to stake his claim on her.
He is quite hilarious in the scenes where he shares his predicament with his students who all get so invested in his love life.
How the film will work lies largely on Phillipa Soo as Emma on the crossroads and she doesn’t disappoint.
She gives a totally engaging portrayal of Emma and you will root for her as she makes a final decision as to who she wants to spend the rest of her life with.
In the end, the romantic reconciliation here is not really just with any of the two guys but more with Emma learning to accept her past and present loves without betraying either of them.
She realizes that in the four years that she has rejoined her family, she has become a different person.
So you neither have to be Team Jesse or Team Sam.
How she does and resolve the love triangle conflict is something you have to find out for yourself when you watch the full movie which is now showing in theaters nationwide as released by Viva International.
