‘Mia’ review: Missing intensity and affection

Mia opens with a tricky scene that shows what exactly makes the romance such an unconvincing trifle.

Mia (Coleen Garcia), blindfolded and excited, is on the rooftop of a building with her boyfriend. Her boyfriend removes Mia’s blindfold and proposes to her. However, Mia’s celebration is halted when her boyfriend accidentally falls off the building and dies.

Two ways

There are two ways to go about the opening.

One is to treat it as it is, as a tragedy that should be as emotionally devastating as it is sudden and unexpected. The other is to treat it as comedy gold, an unbelievably cruel but strangely hilarious act of fate that can only result in laughter. Sadly, Mia is unable to decide which of the two ways it wants to pursue, resulting in a prelude that is not just flat but is also distracting.

See, Mia aspires to be a romance about second chances. 

It situates its tragic titular female who failed at love when her opportunity for a happy ending is truncated by a wicked twist of fate in the beginning of another chance with another man, Jay (Edgar Allan Guzman), an environmentalist who is employed by a mining firm. What ultimately prevents her from another romantic pursuit is that she can’t get over the death of her fiancé, which leads her to believe that she is cursed, making her drown her apprehensions with alcohol and failed attempts at suicide. 

While it is clear that the film wants to mine feelings from Mia’s rediscovery of the pleasures of both loving and being loved, it fumbles in injecting the romance with levity and humor, ultimately failing to arrive at anything concrete and coherent.

Mia is cute and amiable, but it’s also too light to be memorable.

Clever ideas

It’s a pity.

There are clever ideas sprinkled around Mia’s stiff attempts at coloring its love story with wit and whim. The film seems to parallel Mia’s pivot back to love with how lands desolated by mining eventually become habitable forests, enriching the romance with an environmental slant. There is also an amusing family dynamic that adds levity to the blossoming romance between Mia and her newfound love.

Sadly, shallow characterization gets in the way of the film’s lofty endeavors. 

Mia remains to be an emotionally impenetrable protagonist. Her aches and pains are not as drawn out as potently, with all the half-baked stabs at quirk getting in the way of fully exploring her inner turmoil. Jay, on the other hand, initially charms with his incessant need to break whatever ice is there between him and Mia with barrages of useless trivia. However, when it is time for him to reveal more depth, his emotional motivations start feeling forced out of stereotype, more a product of narrative device than anything else.

Disposable entertainment

Mia is disposable entertainment.

It entertains, but it just doesn’t register any real indelible feelings that would render it truly memorable. It lacks intensity. It thirsts for real affection. Its effects fizzle as soon as the credits start rolling. – Rappler.com

 

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ Tirad Pass.

Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.