If We Could Love Like This: The Unbearable Lightness of Life

If We Could Love Like This: The Unbearable Lightness of Life

Tragedy in a story can often strike an emotional chord and move viewers to tears, allowing those outside the story to weep over someone else’s fate. But if a story has to rely on constantly manufacturing tragedies to stir the audience’s emotions, then the work has probably failed. Even from a quick glance at the plot outline, If We Could Love Like This clearly falls into this category.

A man and a woman who never even appear on screen end their lives together because of severe depression. They became lovers after meeting at a doctor’s clinic, and in their wake, the widower Geng Mochi and the widow Bai Kao’er are left entangled in a love-hate relationship that becomes the main thread of the story. This premise is surprising, but still just barely within the bounds of plausibility. What follows, however, becomes increasingly absurd.

Of the two leads, Geng Mochi suffers from a congenital heart condition, while Bai Kao’er is emotionally shattered after the blow she receives. Bai Kao’er’s mother-in-law has terminal cancer, and Qi Shuli—who irrationally becomes obsessed with Bai Kao’er and serves as her backup option, while also being her ex-husband’s older brother—has terminal liver cancer as well. How lacking in imagination and expressive power must a screenwriter be to so bluntly assign every character a tragic backstory just to force emotional impact?

Of course, life is indeed full of suffering, and in reality there are people whose lives are this unfortunate, or even more so. Yu Hua’s To Live portrayed a character who spends his entire life merely living for the sake of survival, powerless in the face of life’s blows. But the greater problem with this drama is the way all of its characters respond to life’s upheavals: they swing wildly and repeatedly between extreme happiness and extreme despair. It makes one almost wonder how numb or carefree the protagonists would have to be to go on living like this.

The story itself is hardly worth extended criticism or commentary. Its one truly commendable aspect is the way Tong Dawei and Liu Shishi portray the delicate, everyday moments of happiness with remarkable subtlety, perhaps because they are drawing on the genuine accumulation of happiness in life itself. When the two characters are together, their moments of joy feel as though they have never been hurt, never tormented each other. No matter what trials and hardships they go through, they are still able to value and cherish one another. In life, perhaps that is the kind of love most worth treasuring.

And yet life also contains too much of that unbearable lightness. Serendipity does happen, of course, but in reality most of us live in a world where chance is far less generous. There are not so many encounters, coincidences, and reunions that allow us to repeatedly mend the regrets in our hearts. For many people, one turn away is a loss that lasts a lifetime. The kind of bond shown in the drama—one that cannot be broken apart, cannot be washed away, and somehow always finds its way back to reunion—is perhaps something that could not be earned even over a thousand lifetimes. More often, life resembles Li Shangyin’s line: “This love may one day become a memory to look back on, but at the time, we were already lost in confusion.”