She's Dating the Gangster

Athena is seventeen and nobody at school looks at her. Kenji is the boy everyone knows; he fights, he is rude, and girls follow him. One day there is a misunderstanding and Kenji asks her a favour: she will act as his girlfriend for a while. The aim is to make his former girlfriend jealous. Athena agrees. While the pretence goes on the two really do grow close. But there is something in Kenji's past he has not told, and a fact about Athena's health is being hidden too. The narrative moves on to a later generation as well. Cathy Garcia-Sampana directs. Kathryn Bernardo plays Athena and Daniel Padilla plays Kenji; Khalil Ramos and Sofia Andres are in the cast. It is a Filipino production. The source is Bianca Bernardino's novel, published online in instalments and later as a book. Kathryn Bernardo and Daniel Padilla are a pair known in the Philippines for the work they do together; much of the film's interest came from that. The film did large business in the Philippines and was among the most watched local productions of its time. The narrative runs on two planes of time; the youth section and the years afterwards are interleaved. The matter it treats is a hidden truth; each side is concealing something from the other. The narrative uses the shape of melodrama openly and does not hide its emotional steering. Its limit is predictability; the premise is familiar, the illness motif conventional, and the ending heavy melodrama. Who it is for: viewers who like Filipino youth films and melodrama. Who it is not for: it is conventional, the emotional dose very high, and the ending sad.