April 18, 2024
Bhuritparin or Parin (Win Metawin) was a young wealthy Thai man who was looking for his mother. Unhappy about her life, his mother Pimchan (Duangjai Hiransri) decided to secretly leave their home. She had already gone away for one month before anyone in their busy household even noticed that she was not there. When Parin got a tip that she was in Hong Kong, he flew there to find her. Stressed out, he was always angry, rude and drunk.
Iris (Janella Salvador) was the Filipina receptionist on duty in the hotel that night when Parin checked in. He was dead drunk when he arrived, so he passed out while Iris was attending to him. As the hotel was short-staffed, she had to be the one to pull him across the hallways to get him settled into his room. The hotel supervisor (Marj Lorico) was advised by Parin's father to take special care of his son, so she assigned Iris to be his personal assistant.
Janella Salvador gave a very open and natural performance as Iris and this was the film's trump card. Her Iris was like a friend we all knew, bubbly and friendly, very relatable. We rally for her optimism and care about what happens to her character. Win Metawin's Parin started off as an annoying spoiled drunk brat, not easy to like. But as expected, the magic of Iris's personality was able to transform Parin into a totally new and improved person.
The lead characters were Filipino and Thai and the story was set in Hong Kong, so the script had three languages in it. The international cast came from the Philippines (Salvador, and Lorico who had a touching scene as Iris's boss), Thailand (Matawin, and Hiransri in a sublime performance as Parin's mother) and Hong Kong (Lee King Lok as Ho Yin, a smiling fisherman fond of Canto-pop on cassette, and Juliana Wong Pui Chun as Cynthia, a friendly realtor).
This new film written and directed by Sigrid Andrea Bernardo could have been just another romance film. It started with a meet-cute with initial antagonism, which eventually developed into real love, as familiar romantic story formulas go. However, the inter-cultural perspective that Bernardo took in her story-telling, together with the winsome chemistry of her two lead stars Metawin and Salvador, gave this film a distinctive dimension of its own. 7/10
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