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Paul Fonoroff

Starring: Kwon Sang-woo, Lee Bo-young, Lee Beom-soo, Jeong Ae-yeon   
Director: Won Tae-yeon  
Category: IIA (Korean)
Bette Davis set the standard back in 1939 with her portrayal of Judith Traherne,  a terminally ill heiress whose disease never ravages her good looks and who turns her glossily tragic struggle into a Dark Victory. More Than Blue, whose Korean title is the more obvious A Story Sadder Than Sadness, reincarnates Judith as handsome TV director K (Kwon Sang-woo),  similarly afflicted with a fatal illness that never takes a toll on his appearance or vitality, a man who tries to find love in a life he knows will end too soon.
Korean movie buffs  will have a field day with this romantic tearjerker, but there's not much for non-aficionados beyond the  film's technical polish and the actors' on-screen chemistry.
Unlike Dark Victory, the directing-scriptwriting debut of poet Won Tae-yeon  fails to endow the patently artificial situations with enough zing to stir the heartstrings of a cynical critic. 
The director lets us in on K's impending mortality from the start, so it's not a question of 'will he die' but a case of how he will handle it in relation to his  love for Cream (Lee Bo-young, right with Kwon).  She's a free spirit who, through a series of neat expediencies, has cohabited with K since school  when both were orphaned. They have an intimate platonic affinity lacking in emotional honesty, as he doesn't want to burden her with his medical woes and neither K nor Cream dares tell of the passion each has for the other.
K's main concern is fixing Cream up with an appropriate mate to take care of her after he's gone, and chief candidate is wealthy, attractive, high-society dentist Cha Joo-hwan (Lee Beom-soo).  The 'fly in the ointment' is Cha's fiery fiancee, Jenna (Jeong Ae-yeon),  a bohemian photographer so unsuitable for Cha that you cannot imagine her ever being content to settle into the humdrum routine of a dentist's wife. It's not too surprising, then, that K and Jenna come to an unorthodox agreement, though played out in too contrived a manner to allow audiences to buy into it.
The film takes a few clever turns towards the end as we see some of the earlier events portrayed Rashomon-like  from a different perspective that provide the soap opera with welcome layers of nuance. It is also in these latter passages that the director displays some stylistic flair in lighting, camera, editing, and sound effects. A lengthy tracking shot, in which K runs along a crowded street and the world comes to a halt as he cries over the impossibility of attaining love, comes close to encapsulating the title's sentiments. More moments like these and both K and More Than Blue might have had a better chance of achieving a true victory over the dark.
More Than Blue opens today



More Than Blue