Secret (2007) Review – When the Music Is Real Enough

 

Header illustration for the film review essay of Secret (2007).

Illustration created for editorial movie review purposes.

💭 Short Personal Reflection

Secret (2007) found me somewhere I hadn't expected to be found. To be honest, I was more captivated by the music than the story itself. Perhaps it comes with time — I find it harder to fully surrender to fantasy, at least in live-action films. Reality has a way of anchoring us more firmly than before. With animation, I still find myself believing almost without question. But here, at first, I remained at a certain distance.

And then something shifted. When the Piano Battle arrived — Chopin's "Black Key" Etude reimagined under Xianglun's hands — the distance closed without my choosing. Art is never fixed, I thought. It is constantly being reborn through the hands of those who perform it. In that moment, the question of fantasy no longer mattered. The music was real enough to quietly bridge the distance between his world and mine.

🎥 Film Overview

Director	Jay Chou
Release	August 2, 2007 (Taiwan)
Runtime	102 minutes
Cast	Jay Chou (Ye Xianglun), Gwei Lun-mei (Lu Xiaoyu), Anthony Wong (Mr. Yip / Xianglun's father), Alice Tzeng (Qingyi)

📖 Story Summary

In the Taiwanese romantic fantasy Secret (2007), written, directed, and scored by Jay Chou in his feature debut, Ye Xianglun is a piano prodigy who transfers to Tamkang Secondary School — the same school where his father teaches music. On his first day, he follows an unfamiliar melody to an old practice room and finds Lu Xiaoyu playing a piece she refuses to name. "That's my secret," she tells him. What begins as a school romance — unhurried, sun-drenched, accompanied by Chopin — carries within it something stranger and more fragile: a mystery that only reveals itself in the film's final act.

The story unfolds at Tamkang High School in New Taipei City, Jay Chou's actual alma mater, and the location gives the film a quality of personal tribute that no set could replicate. The film was shot by cinematographer Lee Ping-Bing, known for his work with Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wong Kar-wai, whose characteristic softness of light gives Secret a visual tenderness that often exceeds what the script demands.

Secret received six nominations at the 44th Golden Horse Awards in 2007, winning Outstanding Taiwanese Film of the Year, Best Original Song, and Best Visual Effects.

🌸 Key Themes

Music as the Film's True Language

Secret announces its priorities immediately: the very first scene is a music class, Chopin is introduced as a character before any of the humans are, and the film never quite lets go of the idea that music is not decoration but meaning. Every significant moment in Xianglun and Xiaoyu's relationship is organized around a piano — not as symbol, but as the actual medium of their connection. They do not fall in love through conversation. They fall in love through listening, playing, being in the same room with the same sound.

This choice reflects something genuinely true about Jay Chou as a filmmaker: he understands music the way most directors understand images. The pacing of scenes, the emotional temperature of encounters, the sense that something is about to shift — all of it is calibrated through sound first and story second. For a viewer who comes to the film through its music rather than its plot, this is not a limitation. It is the film's deepest form of intelligence.

Fantasy, Distance, and the Question of Surrender

The film's fantasy element — which arrives late, and which I will not describe in detail — asks something specific of its audience: the willingness to accept a premise that does not entirely obey the rules of its own logic. For viewers who surrender easily to the genre, this presents no obstacle. For those of us who find that live-action fantasy requires more from us than animation does — whose relationship with the impossible has grown more conditional over time — it can create a quiet distance.

And yet the film seems to understand this, in its own quiet way. Xiaoyu exists at a slight remove from the world around her — present but not fully legible, visible but not fully reachable. Xianglun is drawn to her precisely because she cannot be fully explained. The film does not ask us to understand her. It asks us to feel the particular quality of her presence: the way certain people arrive in our lives already carrying the weight of something we cannot name.

Art Reborn Through Performance

The Piano Battle — three rounds of escalating musical combat between Xianglun and the school's "Prince of the Piano" — is the film's most purely cinematic sequence, and the one that stays longest. Built around Jay Chou's rearrangements of Chopin's Étude Op. 10 No. 5 and Waltz in C# minor, it transforms classical music into something closer to choreography: athletic, playful, technically astonishing, and somehow, in the midst of all its showmanship, genuinely moving.

What the scene understands — and what my own response confirmed — is that a piece of music is never the same piece twice. Each performance is its own event, shaped by the hands and the moment and the particular quality of attention in the room. Chopin wrote the "Black Key" Etude once. Jay Chou plays it differently each time. And watching it remade on screen, I was reminded that art is not a fixed object we receive. It is something that happens between the work and the person encountering it — different every time, and always, if the encounter is real, somewhat surprising.

🎬 What Makes This Film Special

Jay Chou: A Filmmaker Who Thinks in Sound

Few directing debuts announce a sensibility as clearly as Secret announces Jay Chou's. He is, first and foremost, a musician — and the film is constructed with a musician's sense of timing, repetition, and the emotional weight of silence. Scenes breathe differently here than in most romantic films. Pauses are allowed to last. Music is allowed to carry what words have not quite said.

Chou has spoken of the film as a tribute to Chopin and to his own high school years — two things he loves, made into one story. This double tribute gives Secret its particular warmth: it is a film made by someone who remembers vividly, and who has found a way to share the memory that does not require the audience to have been there.

Lee Ping-Bing's Cinematography

The visual tenderness of Secret owes much to cinematographer Lee Ping-Bing, whose work with Hou Hsiao-hsien (In the Mood for Love, Three Times) gave him an instinct for light as emotional atmosphere rather than mere illumination. The school corridors, the piano rooms, the particular quality of afternoon sun through old wooden windows — all of it is shot with a softness that makes the present feel already half-remembered, already becoming the past even as it happens.

This quality — of the present being simultaneously experienced and mourned — is precisely right for a film about time, music, and a love that cannot quite be held.

🌍 Where to Watch

Streaming: Netflix (available in select regions)

Also available for rent/purchase: Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Google Play Movies

Note: Availability varies by region and may change over time. Please check current listings in your area.

📝 Final Thoughts

Beneath its high school romance surface, Secret quietly asks a deeper question: can music do what time cannot — carry a person from one world into another, and make the distance between them briefly disappear?

Secret is not a flawless film. Its story asks more of logic than logic can always provide, and its fantasy asks more of surrender than some viewers will be willing to offer. But it is a film made with genuine love — for music, for a place, for the particular feeling of being young and in the presence of something you cannot explain. And in its best moments, especially the Piano Battle, it achieves something that most films cannot: it makes you feel the music as a physical event, something happening in the room with you rather than simply playing behind the scene.

Nearly twenty years after its release, Secret remains one of the most musically alive films to come out of Taiwanese cinema — a debut feature that trusts music to carry what story cannot, and is, more often than not, right to do so.

⭐ Who Will Appreciate This Film

For those who have found, unexpectedly, that a piece of music reached them in a moment when a story could not — and who have understood, in that moment, that art does not require full surrender to do its work. Perfect for an evening when you want something warm, slightly melancholy, and alive with music. Recommended for viewers who loved Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) or In the Mood for Love (2000) — films where the music is not accompaniment but argument, and where what cannot be said finds its way through what is played. If that kind of quiet, musical truth is what you're looking for, Secret will find you exactly where you are.

💭 Personal Note

I came to Secret with some distance already built in. I find it harder to surrender to fantasy in live-action films — with animation, I still believe almost without question, but here something in me held back. The story, I thought, might keep me at arm's length. And for stretches of the film, it did.

But then the Piano Battle arrived — Chopin's "Black Key" Etude, reimagined and rebuilt and played with a kind of joyful physical abandon — and the distance closed without my choosing.

It felt almost Shakespearean: how the same piece, like the same script, can become something entirely new each time it is brought to life. Xianglun suspended between time and longing felt less like a character to be fully understood and more like a presence carried by the music itself. And I thought: this is what music does that stories sometimes cannot. It reaches across the distance between worlds — between his 1999 and my present, between his youth and wherever I am now — and makes the gap briefly, quietly navigable.

The music was real enough. That turned out to be enough.

음악은, 때로 이야기가 닿지 못하는 곳에 먼저 닿는다 — 시간과 거리마저 넘어.

(A reflection in Korean — because some truths about what music can reach feel truer in the language of the heart.)

💬 Join the Conversation

Has there been a film where the music moved you more than the story — and what did that feel like?

Is there a piece of music that, once you heard it reimagined or performed differently, changed how you understood the original?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments — I'd love to know where you stand.

🎬 More from Cinematic Sanctuaries

If Secret's quiet, music-first portrait of love, time, and the art that bridges impossible distances resonated with you, these films offer their own gentle sanctuaries:

• Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) – Two people, one era, and a Teresa Teng song that holds them together across time and distance
• In the Mood for Love (2000) – Wong Kar-wai's masterwork, where Shigeru Umebayashi's score carries everything the characters cannot say
• Architecture 101 (2012) – First love remembered across decades, with music as the blueprint of what was felt and never finished
• Before Sunrise (1995) – Two strangers, one night, and a conversation so alive it becomes its own kind of music
• 5 Centimeters per Second (2007) – A film where Masayoshi Yamazaki's ending theme arrives like the thing the whole story was building toward

Each of these films offers what Secret offers: the recognition that music reaches places stories cannot always find — and that sometimes, that is more than enough.

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👤 About the Author

Young Lee writes at Cinematic Sanctuaries, exploring stories where music reaches the places that words — and sometimes even stories — cannot quite find.

Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.