Hello Stranger

After months of focusing on Thai BL series, it's time to cross the sea to The Philippines for hopefully something completely different. Hello Stranger is a fresh short series made in 2020 from production company Black Sheep. Here's hoping we see a lot more from them, because this series brings the feels.

Summary: Nerdy uptight university student Mico is the best student in his year, though his keen focus on his studies gives his friends some concern that he might be lonely. When his Literature teacher forces him to work on a project with Xavier, a self-centred basketball jock who is slacking off from his studies, neither of them is impressed but they find a compromise to work together. Over time, the men become close friends, and as Xavier opens up about his tough life, Mico finds he has feelings for him.

This very sweet, simple series keeps its plot, character development and structure to a minimum and focuses instead on the emotion. And boy, what emotion! The 'opposites attract' / 'hate turns to love' romantic drama is the life force of this series, as it shifts its leads between feeling attraction and disdain for each other. Its best moments come when Mico and Xavier try to express in words what they're experiencing and then come to terms with their own feelings, so it's key that their dialogue is nicely written without being trite or over the top. There's padding here, and, for such a short series, its story takes a long time to deliver its tiny theme inside such a limited plot, but the dialogue wins us over in the end.

This series' most unusual element is its setting. Hello Stranger is a BL series for the COVID-19 era. Almost all of its scenarios play out online, as Mico, his friends and Xavier meet during regular Skype chats to organise their study project, play an online quiz or just to catch up. They're all filmed as messenger chats or via laptop webcams in their bedrooms, and they're presented to us in the audience across the usual split screen format of video chats or using alternating direct-to-camera views. There are perhaps fewer than five scenes that aren't online chat sequences. The handful of outdoor scenes in this series come with a huge sense of relief and release - I'm sure the deep breath of freedom that comes from Being Outside will be the longest-lasting best memory for many of us of this awful period once it's over and life gets back to normal. I loved seeing prim Mico outside covered up in hilariously elaborate PPE (though, in a directorial move that's difficult to understand, he removes his mask to talk to other characters).

Having said that, there's definitely some low-key emotional manipulation and pointless melodrama here, which could have easily been avoided. The narrative prop of the poem study project is flimsy and not much comes of it except a very strange presentation that acts as a parallel contrast to the boy's developing friendship. I didn't like it at all when Mico had a bad reaction to a song that Xavier had written. It was so artificial and transparently designed to throw the boy's friendship off course for the rest of the series. The moment when Xavier screams "Fuck!" in inarticulate frustration feels like a whiplash in such a gentle quiet series. The writers didn't need to go to such lengths to make their story more interesting. This series excels when it does away with such cheap plot devices and instead lets its characters sit quietly together and talk.

Rating: 11 out of 20

Ending: happy

Best scene: the moment when Mico finally admits the truth to his friends is heartbreakingly good.