For most of its running time, though, the picture lives up to its marketing as a sappy, beautifully shot and competently directed love story featuring Taiwan’s own Jay Chou, the singer turned actor and now first-time director and screenwriter.

Following a convention established by Jackie Chan — in which, regardless of the picture he stars in and his character’s Chinese name, his English name in the subtitling is always “Jackie” — Chou plays Jay, a transfer student at Tam Kang Senior High School of Arts.

He majors in piano. So does Rain (Kwai Lun-mei), an Audrey Hepburnish gamine who mysteriously comes and goes, often disappearing for days at a time. Jay and Rain go through those awkward, tentative steps of first love. “Just cherish our moments together,” Rain says before vanishing again.

In between the wooing, “Secret” delivers the usual scenes from high school featuring jocks, nerds and rivals for our main characters’ affections (one played by Alice Tzeng, who’s in the running for Most Irritating Pout of the Year).

But where does Rain disappear to? And why does she play an odd piano composition before she does? By now you’re expecting a “Terms of Endearment”-like twist, but “Secret” executes a hard right into paranormal territory that brings the entire picture to a halt.

A movie shouldn’t be just a gimmick; yet “Secret’s” twist is its sole reason for being.This is a classic example of someone, in this case Chou, who’s credited with the story idea, coming up with an inventive twist and forcing a narrative around it rather than leading audiences up to the twist through the exploration of relevant themes. To be sure, “Secret” lays down plenty of visual cues and clues that it flashes back to later in the picture — but unless they’re anchored with some sort of thematic weight, it’s all for show, a kind of visual shorthand.

Indeed, “Secret” is mostly a collection of movie and movie-making cliches, from its big, graduation performance to the swooping camerawork that opens each and every shot.

Too often, characters do things not because it’s motivated but because this is a movie, and that’s what people in movies do. How else can we explain the presence and actions of Anthony Wong’s character — I won’t mention who he plays because, for some inexplicable reason, the picture withholds that information for an awfully long time. In the last reel, we see Wong’s character running through the rain, full of good intentions and desperately chasing after Jay — and then he clutches at his heart as if it’s about give out. Never mind that the character’s health issues have never been discussed prior to this and never mind that it’s not even particularly important to the story proper. He clutches at his heart because that’s the dramatic thing to do when you’re running after someone in the rain. And then, true to the picture’s habit of abandoning storylines, we never learn what happens to him.

Did Chou watch a bunch of movies before tackling his first directing assignment — and then regurgitate them back up? We can be petty and note that at times it seems as if he didn’t shoot enough coverage of a scene and, more than once, he frames a shot in a way that doesn’t deliver its maximum effect, especially during the numerous piano playing scenes. Or we can be gracious and say that Chou does a workmanlike job behind the camera. He sure knows how to present a polished, slick production. Just don’t expect anything underneath the surface.

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