Whatever its title in Tagalog/Filipino, translating the chaste, wistful “different timelines” romance into “Love You Long Time” for international consumption was…unfortunate.

Do a quick online search for it. I’ll wait. This turned up. A LOT. Right?

Even skipping by the idea that the title is a tease, promising something more unsavory than this was ever going to deliver, it’s a frustratingly insipid romance that skips over some “hows,” meanders through inane barely-flirtatious and disconnected chats and concludes with nothing less than utterly unresolved frustration.

Ikay (Eisel Serrano) is a “blocked” young screenwriter catching hell for not getting the revisions right on her “magnum opus,” apparently a tale scripted from her own life. She goes into the country to get a change of scene and catch up with her favorite aunt (Ana Abad Santos).

But on the way, she had a fender bender and this walkie talkie somehow wound up in her car. She turns it on, and this nice young man named Uly (Carlo Aquino) reaches out to her. They chat about their lives, their lonelines and their drab romantic histories.

But every time they try and get together in person, at a local cathedral or restuarant, they fail to connect or even cross paths. Uly is puzzled. Ikay is furious at these “games” he’s playing with her.

Eventually, he posts a Twitter photo to prove he’s in the same park as her. But his “jokes” or “pranks” about how he’s in 2018 and her angry replies about “It’s 2022!” eventually let these two slowpokes figure out what we guessed a few scenes ago.

They’re on different timelines.

They accept this as if it’s a common nuisance of Filipino life, and are as late on the uptake that one of them might be in an alternate universe, or dead, as they were on the possibility that they are in in the same space, but in separate times.

They carry on their chats. Ikay transcribes some of this into her screenplay, and her aunt serves up some self-help speak, quoting (in English) from her favorite American books on the subject. Yes, the U.S. has cornered the market on this “literature.”

“This is your story. Believe in it…Live your ‘present.’ You don’t forget your past, Ikay. You learn from it.”

It’s a very slow and low-heat film. Some of this reaction can possibly be attributed to the story and the split-screen way it’s told, and some to cultural differences. But the leads set off few sparks, with Aquino being as boy-band bland as any romantic hearthrob I’ve seen on screen lately.

And the resolution simply lost me. Even allowing for “It’s not going to be a ‘Hollywood Ending,'” (screenwriter makes hit movie out of this “experience”) it accomplishes nothing and leaves one wishing one had 104 minutes back.

Rating: TV-MA, a bloody car accident

Cast: Eisel Serrano, Carlo Aquino and Ana Abad Santos

Credits: Directed by Jaime Habac Jr., scripted by Gena Tenaja. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44