Director – Chen Yu-Hsun – 2020 – Taiwan – 119m
*****
A woman unexpectedly finds she’s both missed Valentine’s Day and become mysteriously sunburned – charming and hilarious comedy from the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF), on now
A woman enter a police station to report an incident. She went to bed and woke up, but and somehow skipped a day. Also, she is mysteriously sunburned. Does it really matter?, asks the somewhat baffled officer. From her demeanour, it clearly does.
Yang Hsaio-chi (Patty Lee Pei-yu) has always lived life that little bit ahead, that little bit faster than anybody else. One day, she runs into her dad as he’s on his way out to buy some tofu pudding, and she talks him into buying one for her too. It’s the last time she or any of her family see him. He just vanished.
Hsaio-chi works at a post office counter. She and her colleague are familiar with the different types of customer. There are the wife hunters, mothers who bring their sons in so they can eye up the marriage potential. There’s the weird guy who turns up like clockwork at about the same time every day to post a letter to the same P.O. Box address. There’s the “college professor” who tries to queue jump the ticketing system, who she’ll later film trying to grope a fellow passenger on the train and later still unsuspectingly sit beside on a bus.
In the park, she sees a guy leading an aerobics session. She takes an immediate shine to him and he asks her to join in. She can’t afford anything like this, but it turns out these sessions are free to anybody and everybody because Liu Wen-sen (Duncan Lai) likes both exercise and helping people. He promises to come by her workplace and buy an insurance policy off her, and later does so, inviting her to a movie that evening. He seems almost too good to be true.
With Valentine’s Day coming up, and the pair of them seeming so compatible, she resolves to enter them in a joint competition to find the most compatible couple, as she calls in to tell her favourite talk radio host Pixel Man (Bamboo Chen Chu-sheng). But then on Valentine’s Day, nothing seems to be happening. In fact, it’s not Sunday the 14th but Monday the 15th. She’s devastated. And sunburned. She has to change and rush in to work. Where her colleague innocently asks her, “what did you do for Valentine’s Day?” Then she spots a photograph of her with a makeshift cross / arrow of shells behind her in a photographer’s window, something of which she has no recollection. How did that come to be?
The weird P.O. Box guy, Ah Tai ( Liu Kuan-ting), has always lived life that little bit behind, that little bit slower than anybody else. As he later explains, it’s a bit like putting a regular amount of money into a bank… You get the accumulated money plus interest. So it is that on Valentine’s Day, for him time suddenly stands still and almost everyone freezes while he finds himself with 24 extra hours to do whatever he wants. The narrative switches to his story on that day for much of the film’s second half. Without giving too much away, it explains not only the mystery of Hsaio-chi’s missing day, and why Wen-sen is indeed too good to be true, but also that although she doesn’t realise who he is, Hsaio-chi and Tai have a history going back to their childhood.
These preposterous ideas tampering with the very fabric of space and time are so cleverly worked out that you completely believe them. Equally cleverly thought through is what he did on that extra day and what happened to her missing day (including the explanation for the sunburn). A bizarre interlude has her open her wardrobe to discover a man in a gecko costume (Ku Pau-ming) sitting inside, whose hints at what’s going on only serve to further confuse her.
Although the plot mechanics and metaphysical ideas are completely different, this feels a lot like (and is as impressive as) Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993). The male character similarly finds himself in a strange relationship with time and is able to manipulate it to his own advantage, but there the similarity pretty much ends. Except that both films could be described as romantic comedies shorn of all the usual generic clichés which are replaced by deep and if you think about them mind-boggling philosophical and quasi-religious concepts.
This is a gem of a film, possibly the most accessible movie to come out of Taiwan since the very different Eat Drink Man Woman (Ang Lee, 1994). It completely transcends the local culture and deserves to be widely seen internationally. A real audience pleaser.
NB The trailer isn’t particularly inspiring (which does this wonderful film a great disservice – it’s much, much better than this lacklustre effort suggests). It also flips the plot, making it about the male character first and the female one second, which is a terrible misrepresentation, indeed travesty, of the delights the film actually has to offer.
My Missing Valentine plays in LEAFF, the London East Asia Film Festival.
Trailer:
London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF) programme (please click links):
Official Selection, Competition, Hong Kong Focus, Documentary, Retrospective,