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''Ang Kwento Nating Dalawa' thrives given Nestor Abrogena's understated and subtle approach, writes Oggs Cruz
Nestor Abrogena’s Ang Kwento Nating Dalawa is that rare romance that successfully thrives in the lack of spectacle.
Quiet and sincere
The film opens with Sam (Nicco Manalo) waking up late for work.
While walking to the train station, he receives a call. It’s Sarah, presumably a colleague, and she starts scolding him about his being tired, overworked, and sleep-deprived. Through their short conversation, we get a glimpse of who Sam is. He’s a filmmaker, one who’s just gotten a scholarship to study in Berlin. He hasn’t gotten to fixing all of his requirements though, because he is preoccupied. He gets on his train, sits down, and fiddles with his phone.
The film then cuts to a flashback. Sam is again on the train. He alights and meets up with Isa (Emmanuelle Vera), a film student. He’s late. She’s annoyed. He woos her with his very casual charm, and begins random conversations about everything. They’re back on the train, and she falls asleep. It is all very sweet in the way the two lovers have navigated their way from a cute squabble to a scene of such quiet and sincere tenderness.
Slow but sure
Everything else unfolds slowly but surely.
There is more to Sam and Isa’s love story than their random discussions about historic buildings and Kurt Cobain. Frictions appear. Complications arise. Through the low-key misunderstandings and reconciliations however, Abrogena insists on normalcy. He keeps everything feeling as ordinary as all other romantic affairs. It almost feels juvenile, with a lot of the film’s moments set within school corridors and classrooms.
The film is so restrained, so insulated, so indulgent in whispers and gestures instead of impassioned sequences of lovers kissing, fighting and saying quotable quotes as most other cinematic romances that it teeters towards pointlessness. The love story at the center of Ang Kwento Nating Dalawa however is hardly ordinary.
Abrogena cleverly plots Sam and Isa’s romance to keep the one complication that would prevent them from being perfect lovers a penultimate revelation. In so doing, he portrays what could have been a controversial relationship as a love story like any other, one that has grooves and rhythms that are immediately relatable because they are grounded not on who the lovers are but on the fallibility of their emotions with each other.
No judgment
The film’s biggest triumph is its insistence on covering the romance without any form of judgment, as to whether whatever they are doing is within the bounds of ethics.
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