How To Love You is a project about a single mother coming to grips with her daughter growing up, and if you ask me how not to handle the situation.
When the mother discovers that her daughter is involved with another girl the mother completely shuts down until she gets very upset with her daughter, and also her daughter’s girlfriend in another scene.
I’m not really sure if the reason for the mother being so upset was ever truly explained. I think Bridgette Ong (writer, director) was going for the mother was so caught off guard by her daughter being in love with another girl, but to me there was such an over reaction by the mother, that I felt there was way more to the story. Putting my interpretation of character back story aside, I thought How To Love You was really well done on multiple levels.
I thought the acting by pretty much all of main characters was really good. The mother and daughter duo especially had some emotional scenes and I think they handled them very well.
The mother, played by Sherry Tao Ying, must of had some deep-seated issues that caused her to behave the way that she did, which left you not liking the way she handled herself, but at least I never really disliked her character overall. This could have very easily went in a direction where you would not like her, but her character showed signs of vulnerability which at least to me just portrayed her as a single mother that just had to keep dealing with more and more things while trying to hold it all together.
And the daughter, played by Lynn Chia, showed signs of trying to grow up and become an adult, while clearly still not being an adult with some of her decisions, while also having more maturity and understanding of the situation than her mother, so yeah both did a very fine job.
With the project being a short movie, I think How To Love You was about as good as it could be without going into more of the backstory of how the mother became a single parent, and probably would have made for a longer project. I would very much recommend checking out How To Love You if this sounds like a project you’d like to watch.
Quite simply the cinematography by Javen Leong in How To Love You was very very good. I thought the shots were beautifully crafted and the camera work was excellent. Pretty much everything else about the project like the audio was fantastic as well. A job well done by everybody involved with How To Love You.