[HanCinema's Film Review] "The Third Way of Love"

Wu (played by Liu Yifei) is a lawyer who we first meet crying on a plane in the wake of her divorce. Gye-jeong (played by Song Seung-heon) is the corporate heir who gives her something to wipe her tears with. Gye-jeong doesn't interact with her much more than that, although two improbable coincidences arise where they meet again. From there, "The Third Way of Love" is about as straightforward a romance as you can imagine.

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It doesn't take long for this romance to get extremely trite and dull. While the title "The Third Way of Love" has pretensions of there being something beyond imaginary fairy tale love and uninspiring, messy real world romances, the core romance is really just a combination of both of these things, and not really a meaningful departure from either one. Granted, messy real world romances aren't generally brought down by marriages being arranged for business reasons...but I don't think that's what the title meant by a third way.

The only thing particularly remarkable or interesting about "The Third Way of Love" is that Song Seung-heon is in the leading role of this otherwise entirely Chinese movie. As far as I could tell, the script doesn't even hint at the idea that his character is Korean rather than Chinese. Anyone watching this movie not already familiar with the Song Seung-heon connection, as I was, would probably be surprised to learn that South Korean entertainment figures were involved with the film at all.

This was not, in any event, a role that only Song Seung-heon could play. Gye-jeong is quite generic as a leading man. The script plays it off as a twist that Gye-jeong isn't really a womanizer, except this is never really convincingly demonstrated. We just know he wasn't womanizing one woman in particular. Gye-jeong's attraction to Wu is almost entirely just told to us, never really stated or shown, and Wu herself has the bare minimum positive traits to be generic as the leading lady.

As a divorcee, Wu certainly has the potential to say more about the meaning of love and heartbreak than the typical romance heroine. She never actually does, though. At some point a switch is just sort of flipped and Gye-jeong and Wu suddenly become an item. The romance is so unconvincing I was frankly surprised to learn that Liu Yifei and Song Seung-heon engaged in a real world relationship for three years after the film came out.

Despite its attempted branding, "The Third Way of Love" is just a very late example of a kind of melodrama that had already fallen out of fashion in South Korea by 2016, and probably in China by 2015 too for that matter. Its only relevance in the present day is as an odd sort of artifact, when there was open collaboration between the South Korean and Chinese entertainment industries, before any Chinese influence on South Korean media was seen as morally despicable. That story's a more interesting one than what's on screen here.

Written by William Schwartz

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"The Third Way of Love" is directed by John H. Lee, and features Song Seung-heon, Liu Yifei, Jia, Yang Fan. Release date in Korea: 2016/05/19.

Available on DVD from YESASIA

DVD (English Subtitled)