WARNING: SPOILERS

In any love story, the real question for the writer is “How do you keep the lovers apart?” Because the lovers together are pretty boring. Answers have varied through the centuries: family, class, race, homophobia, early death.

The couple in “More Than Blue,” K (Jasper Liu) and Cream (Chen Yi-han), have elements of the last one—early death, his—but that’s not where the drama is. The drama is in withholding this information from her.

No, that’s not even it. The drama is in how he decides to make everything right for her once he’s gone. And the answer to that is a little fucked up. 

The 10 year itch
They meet cute. In high school (played by Chih Tian-hsih and Pipi Yao), he’s sad and withdrawn, she’s bold and insouciant. One day, because he’s sad and withdrawn, he runs superhard around the school track, then lays down on a bench catching his breath. Rebellious and smoking a cigarette against school rules, she comes up to him and blows smoke in his face. He coughs, she laughs. She’s forward, he’s confused. Then a school official approaches, she hands him her cigarette and scrams. He gets in trouble. “Cute.”

She’s the active force in their relationship. She initiates the intro, the follow up, dates. She initiates the first kiss. When she finds out he lives alone (because his father recently died of cancer and his mother split), she suggests they live together (because she, too, is alone). And in this manner—through high school, college and music industry jobs—they live together and love together.

Wait, back up. They don’t really love together. At one point, 10 years in, she’s talking to a friend, Bonnie (Emma Wu), and admits that she and K have never had sex. Bonnie, a superannoying pop star who speaks in the third person, is horrified, and gives the usual shitty advice girls give each other: She tells Cream to find another man to make K jealous. She does. She finds a dentist, Yang You-xian (Zhang Shu-hao). Problem? He’s engaged.

Meanwhile, K’s cancer has worsened and the doc gives him a year to live. How does he spend that time? Living life to the fullest with the woman he loves? Nah. First, he hires some private detectives to look into Dr. Yang to see if he’s a right guy. They come back with a squeaky clean report except for the engagement. So K has them look into the fiancée, Cindy (Chen Tingni), too. Turns out she's cheating on him, they get photos, and K sends them to Dr. Yang. That’s right. He’s trying to break up a couple so the woman he loves can marry a man she was only using to make him jealous.

That’s some fucked-up shit.

But wait! There’s more. Eventually Dr. Yang proposes, Cream accepts, and K helps her pick a wedding dress. Then she makes him try on a groom’s outfit. Then she has their picture taken together—each obviously in love with the other, each saddened by the events they’ve set in motion. Then we see them walking down the aisle together. As bride and groom? Of course not. K is giving away the bride to Dr. Yang. The camera lingers on a sad close-up of him placing her hand into Yang’s; then he leaves the building, the story, this life.

That’s some fucked-up shit.  

But wait! There’s more. You see, K wasn’t the only one with secrets. We find out—via flashback—that Cream knew that K was dying. We also find out via another flashback that Dr. Yang knew that Cream really loved K, not him. So what’s the reason these two went along with the charade? What is Cream thinking? “The man I love—who obviously loves me—is dying, and wants me to marry a man I don’t love ... so I’ll do it? Because even though I initiated every step in our relationship I can’t initiate this last one—where we talk about loving each other?” And what’s Dr. Yang excuse? “Yes, my fiancée loves another man; but I must marry her anyway because...?”

But wait! There’s more.

Sadder than sadness
For a time, we think K just dies somewhere alone. Not true. Via another flashback, we see Cream going to the hospital and finally confronting him about everything. (He cries—because I guess his secret is out, or because she loves him so much, or who the fuck knows.) Then she brings him home. Their home. Yes, she leaves Dr. Yang. And she and K take a photo together on the couch. And as they wait for the timer, K’s head slowly, irrevocably slumps onto hers.

At this point I’m thinking it’s like a fucked-up version of “Gift of the Magi”:

• I’m dying so I got you a husband
• I left my husband because you’re dying

Except then I think she dies. Right? I think his gravestone includes her name as well. (It flashed by quickly, sorry.) And Dr. Yang looks at it and cries. He sobs ... for himself? The sadness of the world? The fact that he lost his hot cheating fiancée to this idiot scheme?

“More Than Blue” is based on a 2009 Korean film of the same name—both in English and in the original. The Korean version translates as “A Story Sadder than Sadness” as does the Chinese: 《比悲伤更悲伤的故事 》. This version opened last November in Taiwan and broke the opening weekend box-office record, then became the highest-grossing domestic film of the year. It’s now playing in Mainland China, where it’s grossed $120 million and counting.

None of this exactly shocks me. Thirty years ago in Taiwan, when I lived there, sappy/weepy was big: Air Supply (particularly “All Out of Love”), George Michael (particularly “Careless Whisper”), and the 1980 movie “Somewhere in Time, with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour as time-crossed lovers who are united in death. Or something. That whole “lives of quiet desperation” thing Thoreau warned us about? The Chinese find it glorious.