One Week Friends

一周的朋友

China, 2022, colour, 2.35:1, 105 mins.

Director: Lin Xiaoqian 林孝谦 [Gavin Lin].

Rating: 6/10.

High-school rom-com, inspired by a Japanese manga, lacks enough emotional clout to sustain its manufactured story and unstarry cast.

STORY

A town somewhere in China, autumn 2012. A new pupil, Lin Xiangzhi (Zhao Jinmai), is transferred to the gaokao (university entrance exam) repeat class at Shenghua Senior High. One of the other pupils there, the lackadaisical Xu Youshu (Lin Yi), is immediately smitten by her, a fact she seems to notice. Lin Xiangzhi is seated next to the mouthy Song Xiaonan (Shen Yue), who is always verbally sparring with Xu Youshu but actually has a secret crush on his friend and deskmate, Jiang Wu (Wang Jiahui), who doesn’t appear to realise it. Xu Youshu makes several attempts to get to know Lin Xiangzhi but is rebuffed each time. Lin Xiangzhi, who is from another town and is staying with her aunt, keeps herself to herself, and is also taking medication for some reason. At the start of a new week, Xu Youshu tries again, but this time Lin Xiangzhi doesn’t even recognise him as her classmate. Even Song Xiaonan is intrigued by this, and finally Lin Xiangzhi tells the three friends that she suffers from a kind of PTSD – caused by an accident for which she was hospitalised for a while – in which her memory of friends is erased each weekend and starts anew on Mondays. She deliberately doesn’t make friends as it’s not fair on them and she’ll never remember the good times. Undeterred, Xu Youshu proposes becoming her “one-week friend”; Lin Xiangzhi finally relents and the two study together, with her keeping a diary so she can remember each Monday who her three friends are. The foursome also set up a “secret base” in an abandoned observatory, where they arrange a surprise 18th birthday party for Xu Youshu, who later that evening declares his love for Lin Xiangzhi when they are alone. Troubled, she runs off, and by Monday she claims she can’t remember anything at all, including who Xu Youshu, Song Xiaonan and Jiang Wu are.

REVIEW

After two features adapted from South Korean originals (More Than Blue 比悲伤更悲伤的故事, 2018; A Trip with Your Wife 跟你老婆去旅行, 2021), Taiwan director Lin Xiaoqian 林孝谦 [Gavin Lin] turns to Japan for inspiration with high-school rom-com One Week Friends 一周的朋友. Unlike Blue, which was almost a shot-for-shot re-make of the Korean original, Friends is only marginally based on the Japanese manga, with a major twist halfway that isn’t even in the original. Despite that, and Lin’s characteristically smooth direction and packaging, the film doesn’t have the emotional clout it should, largely thanks to a cast that’s lacking in big names. Lin’s seventh feature, and his first to be entirely funded by and shot in the Mainland, it took only a polite RMB122 million last summer.

The script by Lv Anxian 吕安弦, who wrote the road rom-com A Trip with Your Wife, is based on the 2011 manga One Week Friends 一周间フレンズ。, written and drawn by Hazuki Matcha 叶月抹茶 (see left). Hazuki’s work was first turned into a TV anime series (2014) and then a film (2017) directed by Murakami Shosuke 村上正典 and starring actress Kawaguchi Haruna 川口春奈 and actor Yamazaki Kento 山崎贤人 (see poster, below left). Both of those Japanese adaptations stuck closely to the original manga; Lv’s script, after introducing the basic concept (though in a different way), then invents a big twist, ditching all of the second half of Hazuki’s manga as well as several of her characters. Given the basic unbelievability of Hazuki’s over-cute story – a high-school pupil claims she cannot remember her friends from one week to the next as her memory is wiped every weekend – Lv’s twist initially works well, reinvigorating a very manufactured idea that has a limited shelf-life. But after some flashbacks to the past, and replaying present-day scenes from a fresh perspective, the film loses its narrative drive around the 80-minute mark, and spends a further 20 minutes slowly resolving things in a laboured way.

A name cast could have maybe disguised the film’s structural weaknesses, as it has in some of Lin’s past films (Welcome to The Happy Days 五星级鱼干女, 2015; More Than Blue); but 20-year-old Zhao Jinmai 赵今麦 (the heroine’s BFF in youth comedy Go Brother 快把我哥带走, 2018), and TV actor Lin Yi 林一, 24, in his first major big-screen role, are just okay as the transfer pupil with the dodgy memory and her classmate who repeatedly courts her, and neither is helped by the fact that 26-year-old Shen Yue 沈月 (the pesky orphan in The Yinyang Master 侍神令, 2021), as the girl’s deskmate, is far livelier than both the leads put together. As the boy’s best pal and deskmate, newcomer Wang Jiahui 汪佳辉 is okay as far as his supporting role allows. Apart from TV actress Fan Shiran 范诗然, 22, as a jolly girl from the boy’s past, other roles are minimal. For the record, the actress Ma Li 马丽 who plays the boy’s mother is not the Ma Li 马丽 but an identically named, older actress with a long career in theatre and TV.

Technical credits are characteristically good looking, even though Lin is using different key crew this time. Mainland steadicam operator Deng Lu 邓璐 (Love Education 相爱相亲, 2017; An Elephant Sitting Still 大象席地而坐, 2018; Us and Them 后来的我们, 2018), receiving her first credit as a d.p., provides a warm-looking, smoothly composed frame for all the highly manufactured goings-on, while Hong Kong veteran editor Li Dongquan 李栋全 [Wenders Li] keeps it all flowing, with a superior score by Taiwan’s Luo Enni 罗恩妮 and Chen Jianqi 陈建骐 (More Than Blue) edging everything along and discreetly adding atmosphere. Though the film was shot in Sichuan province (Chongzhou and Chengdu), it has a thoroughly Taiwan look, apart from the simplified Chinese characters.

The end credits list some “pre-production staff” (including noted Taiwan d.p. Che Liangyi 车亮逸 [Randy Che]) who never got to work on the actual film, presumably due to Covid delays in shooting.

CREDITS

Presented by Beijing Alibaba Pictures Culture (CN), Lhasa Mantra Pictures (CN), Hoshino Film (CN), Dongyang Triosdom Media (CN), Zhengfu Pictures (CN), Dongyang Qingchen Yingshi (CN), Hainan Canno Studio Pictures (CN).

Script: Lv Anxian, Xi Ti. Manga: Hazuki Matcha. Photography: Deng Lu. Editing: Li Dongquan [Wenders Li]. Music supervision: Luo Enni, Chen Jianqi. Art direction: Fang Shengxiang. Styling: Wei Xiangrong. Sound: Hao Gang, Wang Chong. Visual effects: Liu Xintu, Liu Yuanfu (Skylight [Beijing]).

Cast: Zhao Jinmai (Lin Xiangzhi), Lin Yi (Xu Youshu), Wang Jiahui (Jiang Wu), Shen Yue (Song Xiaonan), Fan Shiran (Xu Jie), Ma Li (Xu Youshu’s mother), Zhang Lei (head teacher of class), Li Xiaochuan (Xu Jie’s father), Li Xiao (Xue Jie’s mother), Zhang Chenxiao (Xu Yi, Xu Jie’s younger brother), Fan Yan (Lin Xiangzhi’s mother), Wang Shi (Lin Xiangzhi’s father), Liao Yue (Jiang Wu’s elder sister), Chen Lin (security guard), Dai Wenjun (psychologist).

Release: China, 18 Jun 2022.