Moments of Love as was I expected. Like its title, the dialogue wasn't very deep and most of its production values reminded me of a telenovella. It’s a romantic drama from the Philippines, and its core love story is between two characters who live in different times.
Marco is on vacation in a countryside bed and breakfast with a couple of friends. One day an old woman, Rosa, pushes him out of the way of a speeding car and she gets knocked over. She remains in a coma while Marco feels guilty to be a survivor. The old woman's granddaughter Lianne is distraught but warms up romantically to Marco. Rosa's daughter--Lianne's mother--at the beginning is angry that her mother insisted on coming to this area but she too realizes the accident is not Marco's fault.
At the bed and breakfast Marco tries to make a phone call on an old telephone, and somehow he is connected to a woman living in 1957--Divinna. Her father owned the plantation business the bed and breakfast sits on, which in her time was her family's home. Divinna's father has promised her in marriage to the landownder to pay off debts, but the fiance is a selfish brute. Divinna and Marco talk to each other about their mutual concerns, at first not realizing they are in different times. Soon Marco figures things out and makes Divinna promise to meet him in 2006.
The plot is reminiscent of a couple romantic time travel movies that came out around that time, the U.S. film The Lake House, which in turn was based on an older Korean film, Il Mare. There are some weak subplots concerning Marco's friends which the movie could have done without since they were not significant to Marco's story and were quite cheesy. The chemistry between the two leads, although their screentime together was mostly through phone conversations, was good, although as I said the scripting is not very original. Some of the production values showing the 1957 timeline was good but I wanted more.
Supporting characters for the most part are stereotypical or caricatures. There were several silly illogical moments that made the characters seem stupid, such as Marco being shown a photo of Divinna and being shocked to find out who she is, when just a couple days ago he dug up a photo she left for him; Lianne and her mother stress how familiar Marco looks but just can't think why, and later we see that there is a room full of portraits of Marco which the women have access to. The plot goes as one would expect and there were no surprises to how the story would end up. While the premise was interesting and as you can see the plot has been remade several times, the film could have been so much more with a better script and more real fleshing out of the supporting characters into real people. Playing up some of the historical aspects of the Philippines or the plantation setting would have made it a more unique film.
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