Someday soon someone is going to come up with an algorithm for commercial seishun eiga (youth films). Plug in the variables — teenaged love in its more innocuous variations being first and foremost — and pop out a script for another hit.
If not computer-generated, Shosuke Murakami's "One Week Friends," with its story of a manga-loving guy falling for a memory-impaired girl, contains obvious borrowings from successful predecessors, not all local. Based on Matcha Hazuki's manga of the same title, it is both the latest in a line of domestic movies with memory as a theme — "Gachi Boy: Wrestling With a Memory" ("Gachi Boi," 2008) and "Forget Me Not" ("Wasurenai to Chikatta Boku ga Ita," 2015) being others — and a clever variation on "Groundhog Day."
Similar to that 1993 Harold Ramis comedy classic, the hyperactive curly-haired hero, Yuki (Kento Yamazaki), is caught in a sort of time loop as he frantically tries to win over the heroine: the shy, cute Kaori (Haruna Kawaguchi). But unlike Bill Murray's obnoxious weatherman, Yuki is not the victim of a cosmic prank (or rather karmic justice). Instead, he is in love with a girl who not only can't get his name straight but also forgets his very existence after the weekend. She tells him bluntly that even being "just friends" is completely out of the question.
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