I'm Drunk, I Love You

Carson and Dio have been closest friends for seven years at university. She has been in love with him for seven years and has never said so. Days before graduation he proposes a trip: go north to La Union for a festival. Carson knows it is the last chance. They drink along the way and the sentence that needs saying keeps being postponed. JP Habac directs, from a screenplay written with Giancarlo Abrahan. Maja Salvador plays Carson and Paulo Avelino plays Dio. It opened in the Philippines on 15 February 2017 and became one of the independent films that did well commercially. The idea is to refuse unrequited love as a story. The narrative does not put Carson in the right; it shows that waiting seven years was also a choice, and the ending does not go where the genre expects. The road film shape is common in Philippine cinema; short distances, buses and coastal towns are inside the narrative and the locations are real. Drink sets the form; the scenes change with the level of drunkenness and the camera works accordingly. The best thing in it are the supporting characters; Carson's friends keep bringing a view from outside and the comedy comes from there. Who it is for: viewers who like Philippine independent cinema and youth romance. Who it is not for: the narrative is scattered in the first half, little happens, and the emotional pitch rises at the end.