Pol had admired fellow freshman Laya ever since that chance meeting during enrolment time while taking their school ID photo. However, he never did get the guts to confess to her how he felt. On the last day of school, a distraught Laya (who just had a bad breakup with her boyfriend Maui) got into the taxi Pol was driving (actually to driving to watch a concert series that night). He saw this as a serendipitous chance to finally spend some time with and get to know better the biggest crush he had been harboring for the past year.
McCoy de Leon and Elisse Joson fit right into the roles of Pol and Laya. Being exes in real life must have made the filming of their sweet scenes difficult, but it did not show on the big screen. There was very good chemistry between this young couple and they surely knew how to play up the cutesy romance for the sake of their fans. While I was watching this, I got the feeling that I was watching a younger version of JC Santos and Bela Padilla (as first paired up in "100 Tula Para Kay Stella").
The simple story would have been all over in 20 minutes if Pol had simply brought Laya to the bus station for her trip back to Manila. However, to beef the midsection of the film and make the whole film more entertaining, director JP Habac ("I'm Drunk I Love You") used the device of a game which Pol agreed to play with Laya. Each would pick out a piece of paper from a purse on which was written a crazy dare. These dares ranged from eating a fried day-old chick to dancing on a busy sidewalk to getting a tattoo!
There was also a short but funny diversion when the story decided to enter the horror comedy genre, always a hit with the young crowd. Aside from Pol and Laya, they had with them their best friends: the ditzy Erna (played by the ever-reliable Chai Fonacier), the sassy Kevs (played by Milo Elmido Jr.) and Pol's gay BFF and Kevs' boyfriend Emerson (played by Paolo Santos, whom I just saw play lead in an episode of MMK the previous week as a character very different from who he was here).
Baguio had always been a very photogenic setting for a romantic movie, and the cinematographer Lee Briones-Meily was able to capture its best colors and images. Like most of these teen romances, there was also a very eclectic music soundtrack in this one, featuring songs sung by Johnoy Danao (his version of Session Road's "Suntok sa Buwan"), KZ Tandingan ("Bakit Lumuluha") and of course, Moira dela Torre ("Tagu-taguan"). Markus Peterson had a cameo playing Laya's jerk ex-boyfriend Maui, and since he was an R&B singer here, we get to hear his song "Di Mo Na Kailangan Pang Malaman."
The main problem of this film was really the paper-thin plot. There were some moments of well-written reflections about life as a young person. You will want to hang around to see if they will get together at the end or not, but the entire midsection was obviously just fluff to make it seem like there was something substantial happening, when everything felt conveniently contrived. That said, this film was still pleasantly diverting nonetheless, thanks to the youthful brio and energy of the cast. 6/10.
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