‘A Glimpse of Forever’ REVIEW: Failing in Sensitivity
‘A Glimpse of Forever’ REVIEW: Failing in Sensitivity
Jerome Ponce as Dante in A Glimpse of Forever. Taken from the official trailer on YouTube.
Major spoilers ahead for A Glimpse in Forever
Subversion in a film can be tricky. At the hands of an inspired filmmaker who knows how to tinker with it, subversion can produce a film that genuinely amazes or sometimes even provokes insightful thoughts. The trailers and promos of Jason Paul Laxamana’s latest offering promised a seemingly typical love affair with a sci-fi twist between a neglected wife and a VTuber, and part of me wishes that this simple premise was what we got with all of its cheesy and downtrodden clichés in lieu of what it tried to mine during its run time. It instead substitutes the promised romantic drama with an exploration of mental illnesses in men, especially social anxiety disorder, or S.A.D. for short, and how it affects the lives of those who suffer from it.
Substituting the romantic drama story for a PSA on mental illness is not necessarily a bad thing for a film, but if handled by a filmmaker who does not anchor it in something sincere and honest, it could result in something so disingenuous and disconnected from reality that it becomes offensive. A Glimpse of Forever is problematic not because it abandons romance to convey a message about men’s mental health, but because of how it approaches its subject matter with so much insensitivity and ignorance.
Laxamana’s most recent feature mainly revolves around an aspiring actor named Dante (Jerome Ponce), who works for ForeVR, a company that sells hot men as objects of desire and fantasy through virtual reality avatars controlled by "Mumu," motion capture actors of which Dante is a part of. He suffers from an acute case of TV social anxiety disorder resulting from a traumatic childhood memory, amplified by the loss of his best friend in a freak accident that disrupts his social life and prevents him from attaining his dream of acting on stage. In fact, his condition is so severe that he has to hide his face in a cloth mask to function and interact with other people properly. And even with this face mask on to make himself feel safe, he is still withdrawn from the world outside his own.
One day, a tie dye shirt entrepreneur and enthusiast named Glenda (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) arrives at the ForeVR branch where Dante is working to ask for an unusual request: to have a VR session with a secret Boy-Next-Door avatar named Kokoy (Diego Loyzaga) that the company never uses since no “Mumu” is good enough to make him work. Luckily, Dante is well-equipped to handle the virtual avatar, and in their sessions, Glenda, instead of ogling and lusting over the hearthrob in front of her, uses the avatar as an outlet to release the pent-up anger as a result of being married to a narcissistic and neglectful man named Ed, also played by Loyzaga in a dual role, who is also suffering from a plethora of psychological maladies that the film never bothers to elaborate on.
Right from Dante’s introduction and until the reveal of Ed’s issues, we already get the hints of insensitivity plaguing this film in Ponce and Loyzaga’s performances. To put it mildly, the acting of the two male leads is exaggerated and uninspired. Ponce’s interpretation of a person stricken with social anxiety disorder is so inauthentic and cosmically overblown to soap operatic proportions that it starts to seem like he is doing a parody out of it. Thus, it was not at all shocking to me when he revealed that the only preparation he ever did for the role was researching about S.A.D. on the Internet and that he never even met someone who is actually living with it, which should be the bare minimum for these kinds of films.
Diego Loyzaga as the virtual avatar named Kokoy in A Glimpse of Forever. Taken from the official trailer on YouTube.
Loyzaga's Ed is also guilty of this farcical drama, but with a lot more mercurial and antagonistic energy, which makes it difficult to root for him. But the character of Ed is not only a vessel for Loyzaga’s lousy acting; he’s also the perfect encapsulation for everything wrong with the film’s approach to its subject matter. Laxamana wants to paint Ed as someone in need of sympathy since the character is also suffering from some vague psychiatric sickness with similar symptoms to OCD, bipolar disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder, and yet he never gives us any clear indication that the character will be redeemed. Quite contrary to what Laxamana intends to do, he makes Ed look a lot more toxic and scary, even with a scene that’s supposed to show his redemption.
After a very public and humiliating fight with Glenda and revealing a terrifying side of him that shows his unhealthy possessiveness over her, Ed’s idea of reconciliation is to overcompensate by buying out the entire stock of tie dye shirts she’s been selling so that she can go home early to him and adorn their entire living room with a ridiculous amount of flowers while he hollers like an animal in pain as he begs her not to leave him. To the uninitiated, it would seem like a sweet gesture. For those who know, however, they will recognize his actions as a sign of love bombing, a form of emotional and psychological abuse that sees a person going above and beyond for someone in an effort to manipulate them into a relationship. The biggest irony here is that for a film that purports to say something worthwhile about mental illness, it is tone deaf in its approach and ignorant with its depiction, thereby exposing the knowledge Laxamana has on the subject to be as deep as a kiddie pool.
And just when you think that the film couldn’t infuriate you further, the film cops out with the closures given to the characters. For Dante, he is never given any meaningful resolution to any of his psychological ailments or any of the trauma he has gone through. In lieu of this, in another glaring display of cluelessness, his story ends with him starting to take Propranolol, which magically takes away his ailment and gives him his confidence back as if the pill were giving him superpowers, which doesn’t make any lick of sense since the drug only treats the physical symptoms and not the anxiety itself.
Glenda (Jasmine Curtis-Smith) wearing virtual reality goggles in A Glimpse of Forever. Taken from the official trailer on YouTube.
As for Curtis-Smith’s Glenda, she is nothing but an inconsequential character used as a mere plot device to push the character arcs of the two men forward: an emotional punching bag for Ed and a subject of affection for Dante that never materializes. By the end of the film, she is completely irrelevant and nothing more than a pretty face in the poster.
Ed, on the other hand, finally goes to seek help (incidentally the same one that Dante goes to), as if we have not just witnessed the most heinous and clear-cut case of emotional abuse and manipulation from him, with his condition remaining ambiguous until the end. During the Q&A session following the screening that I attended, Laxamana was asked for clarification regarding Ed’s ailment, to which he responded by reaffirming the vague symptoms and saying, in essence, “Magpapa-consult pa lang siya. So, undiagnosed pa,” (“He just started going for consultation. So, he is still undiagnosed”), which sounds more like an excuse for the naivety and remissness of the topic being discussed, considering the intent of the film, rather than a legitimate send-off.
A Glimpse of Forever has a very noble intention, but unfortunately, it is awfully misguided by perfunctory hands and too uninformed to truly say something of value. At the same Q&A, Laxamana, while talking about Diego Loyzaga’s dual role in the film, referred to the character of Ed as the one with “saltik”, a derogatory term for people with mental health issues, clearly showing what kind of place he is coming from. But I’ll let you be the ultimate judge of that.
VIVA Films’ A Glimpse of Forever opens at cinemas nationwide on March 6, Wednesday.
