‘Lakbay2Love’: A modern bike movie

Midway through this earnest, gorgeous film is a moment that makes you realize this is more than a biking romance story.

During a break in a bike ride through lush forest, the young documentarian Lianne (Solenn Heusaff) has an affectionate conversation via Skype on her cell phone with her mom, an overseas worker, who gives her struggling daughter a gentle scolding after being asked for birthday money to buy a bike.

"Lakbay2Love" is not merely the latest movie to use the bicycle as a vehicle for romance. It is a thoroughly modern film that captures the angst of many Pinoy millennials who must cope with absentee OFW parents.

That incongruous scene in the forest is replicated countless times daily as OFW parents try to maintain the semblance of family relationships through the Internet.

Lianne has a similar – except partly spoken in French – Skype exchange with her French father (Solenn is also half-French), who is long separated from her mother. The Filipino diaspora has produced a generation of such mixed-race globalized progeny (hello, Miss Universe) who have formed a big part of the nation's international image.

Established as a typical, alienated, gadget-consumed yuppie, Lianne goes on to wallow in the more timeless heartaches of youth. (Typical, of course, except for the Eurasian eye-candy features.)

She's still recovering from the sudden flight of a longtime paramour when she and her loud-mouthed sidekick Monday (Patricia Ismael) begin shooting a nature documentary and meet the bike-riding forest ranger JR, played by Dennis Trillo.

To produce the documentary, the asthmatic Lianne needs to learn to bike on forest trails too – and who better to teach her than her adorable resource person?

That sets up entire sequences of what can only be called bike and nature porn, with lots of dazzling aerial video of bikers moving gracefully through spots familiar to many Pinoy cyclists – La Mesa watershed and Timberland in San Mateo especially.

As if consciously avoiding an unrealistically idyllic portrait of cycling, director Ellen Ongkeko-Marfil moves the action to traffic-clogged Manila streets where a cyclist gets knocked down by a black van.

I must add that watching this occasionally preachy film just days after I was hit by a jeepney myself while biking on Aurora Boulevard made the movie a more visceral experience.

The more shared emotion, however, is the pure joy that anyone who has ever ridden a bike knows and which the film celebrates so unabashedly.

That feeling could only have been stoked by watching the movie's  "green carpet premiere" last week in UP Diliman's sunken garden with a lawn full of bikers lying on banigs under the stars.

All the two-wheeled interaction between the main characters sparks the inevitable love interest.

While the city-bred Lianne feels drawn to JR on a rebound, she falls in love as well with the grandness of nature she discovers while biking. Fellow nature lovers will recognize that moment when she breaks down in tears while beholding a sun-speckled valley vista.

In the midst of her reverie, Lianne's missing paramour Macky (Kit Thompson) suddenly shows up to disrupt the budding romance.

Torn between two hunks, Lianne has an epiphany, which I will spoil if I reveal it here.

Suffice it to say her conflicts in the end are resolved in a way that hugot-obsessed millennials may find unpredictably endearing.

In an age of overloaded social media networks, "Lakbay2Love" refreshes ageless notions of connection, with oneself and with a world that is still as large as ever. — BM, GMA News

Lakbay2Love opens in mainstream theaters on February 3, 2016.