No Love
A gender-flipped, sappy, scattered romance is still a sappy, scattered romance.
My Missing Valentine
Director: Nobuhiro Yamashita • Writer: Kankuro Kudo
Starring: Masaki Okada, Kaya Kiyohara, YosiYosi Arakawa, Aki Hano, Masaya Kato, Rion Fukumuro
Japan • 1hr 59mins
Opens Hong Kong February 14 • IIA
Grade: C+
Okay, I’m going to admit I can barely remember Chen Yu-hsun’s 2020 My Missing Valentine. I remember it was set in Taiwan. I remember a young woman struggling to recall lost time on or around Valentine’s Day. I recall a post office, a missed date and an entire city getting frozen in time one day. That stab at whimsical, semi-magical romance could easily have been a remake of a Japanese film; it’s cut from a popular Japanese cinematic cloth. Director Nobuhiro Yamashita relocates the action to Kyoto, and by gender-flipping the characters he at least makes his pedestrian spin on My Missing Valentine | 1秒先の彼 considerably less creepy. This time around the nearly comatose, unresponsive partner on a romantic dream date is the dude. Progress!
As in Chen’s film, the “magical” part pivots on the contrivance that the story’s protag experiences the world faster than everyone else. It throws off their sense of perspective and their constantly disjointed sense of time drives the story. Also like Chen’s film, that sky-high concept is totally cast aside by the halfway point of the movie, rendering My Missing Valentine the latest in a string of middling (mid as the kids like to say) rom-coms that are more forehead smacking than amusing. And there’s no damn Valentine’s Day shit either.
Five minutes is all it takes…
As always, the action in My Missing Valentine only happens because every single person in the story acts the damn fool all the time and no one thinks, “Hey! How about I just have a five-minute conversation with X?” and instead dicks around lurking in corners and “pining” and all that jazz. Let it be known this is not this movie’s problem, it’s not a Japanese cinema problem, it’s not a Taiwanese cinema problem. It’s a rom-com problem. I’ve made myself clear on this genre before. Moving on. Fool #1 is Hajime (Masaki Okada, Villain, Drive My Car), a post office drone who’s always a step ahead and who’s got the hots for the clearly mercenary musician Sakurako (Rion Fukumuro, the only actor with a bit of sass). But coming in every day to buy a single JPY84 stamp is Idiot #2 Reika (Kaya Kiyohara), a shy photographer who’s mailing her photos to a PO box in some small town somewhere. She’s usually a step behind. When Hajime seemingly misses his big date with Sakurako, it jogs something deep in his memory as he tries to figure out what happened.
In the second segment of Valentine’s sharply regimented three-part structure, the focus is on Reika and her endless puttering and (still) borderline stalking of Hajime. But it’s okay, she has her reasons. One day after hitting the post office Reika notices the world has come to a dead halt, and she and a hapless bus driver (YosiYosi Arakawa) are the only ones moving. Then part three happens, Hajime figures shit out, Reika grows a pair and their shared back story is revealed. Yada yada.
Whatever ideas about how memory works, how perception is clouded by time, regret and missed opportunity (man I’m giving this a lot of credit) writer Kankuro Kudo’s adaptation may have had are once again lost in a miasma of whimsy and saccharine predictability. Strange, because Kudo – the architect of the gold standard Japanese romance, Crying Out Love, in the Center of the World – managed to lean into that sentimentality to much better effect in the surprisingly charming Mom, Is That You? The film relies on the dynamic between Reika and Hajime that doesn’t exist (these are boring people and not in a good way), as well as Hajime’s over-eager sweetness, which is less non-existent as it is irritating. His boundless optimism makes you want to push him in front of a bus. Wedging in a sub-plot about a missing father just muddies the waters, even if it does give us the film’s single laugh-out-loud moment involving an infant and an swallowed key. Like Chen’s version, My Missing Valentine meanders and loses focus, and never fully commits to the fantastical elements that could have lifted it from the rom-com gutter to something at least attempting creativity within the strictures of a distinct sub-genre. It could be worse. But it could also be much, much better. — DEK