the self-destruct button

i just caught Jay Chou's latest attempt at movie direction - Secret. It's a story that started with mushily innocent puppy love. Maybe every cynic was like that before they become a cynic, in the first half hour, I sat in the cinema telling myself I would have loved this movie so much if I had watched this 10 years ago, when I was naive and full of lofty, unrealistic aspirations of love and how it should be. When I was brave enough to hold the notion that first love would naturally be the most memorable if not the only love in a lifetime, yet after the first half an hour, I found my shell melted by Gui Lun-Mei, Jay Chou and the beautiful classical piano pieces in this film.

In this show, there was no pretense, no attempts to be exceptionally intelligent, no sinister bad guy (except fate, perhaps), just good old-school romantic. I think Jay bit off exactly as much as he could chew, not overly ambitious in terms of cinematography, slightly cheesy in some parts especially CSI-series-like zoom-in to the innards of the piano when the concertos are being played but overall he chose not to focus on overly elaborate sets, but to flaunt what he was best at - music and romanticism.

He got me, just when I thought I had buried all my fantasies about love and romance, to become a pragmatic. Jay Chou, with one film, awakened that side of me that is hopeless... a hopeless romantic, that is... and towards the end I was rooting for him, and I knew I would have done exactly what he did, to pursue the love worthwhile - even if it might cost him his life... because what life is worth living, if it was at the expense of a love lost...

Every love begins like that - puppy love, the excitement, rapid heartbeat butterflies in the stomach, that uncontrollable grin when we recall some stupid thing he said, the adrenaline (or pheromone?) rush that keeps us awake at night just to hear a lover's voice for hours on the phone. Feelings that make us do crazy things like her staying up all night to burn a CD compilation of his favorite songs so he can listen in his car everyday, take time off from work just to run home to make him some herbal tea for his sore throat, skip a day of work to recce across the Causeway to see where he can bring her to see fireflies that she's never seen. It happens to everyone, from age 17 to 70 - the blossoming of a new romance, as tempting as a self-destruct button, that tells us to throw every warning we've heard to the wind.

We can never explain why against the best of our efforts, our heart wins in that struggle and makes us walk in the exact opposite direction that our head wants us to... the romantics in us, needless to say, responds to the tug at the strings of our heart, risking our marriage, disregarding objections from our friends, even ignoring all the warnings signs our own eyes can see, it doesn't matter if our heads are screaming for us to stop and turn back, our hearts overrules it all... and like a mesmerized moth to a flame... we approach, not without hesitation... but it's the hesitation that tells us how much we really want to feel that fire, even it means getting burnt to death...

It's not that we do not know the price we pay for that shortlived passion would be great, the pain we'd have to face one day, when we awake from this dream. Love turned sour, one time after another... but we still want to keep on trying, still we carry the hope... but again and again we get disappointed. So much in our hearts we want to say, yes - he is the one, whose hand I will hold till death - whom I will love through sickness and in health - (ironically I feel health or good times present more opportunities to stray than in bad times, sickness).

Is it me? Is it just the sinful nature? Is it the devil tempting? Or is it just a fact, that every love will fade to a mundane routine? And I would find myself enticed to run into the arms of someone new and more exciting? If I do find a hopeless romantic like myself, will I really be happy? What if I run into one such person after I'm married? Everyone is dreaming of running into that perfect someone... but the fact is I would never become a perfect someone, perhaps that's why no relationship will ever be perfect?

I better stop writing, before I confuse myself further... keke