18×2 Beyond Youthful Days, a Taiwanese-Japanese co-production directed by Michihito Fujii and featuring a mixed Taiwanese and Japanese cast, proves to be a well-executed melodrama centered around themes about first love and growing up.
36-year-old Taiwanese video game developer Jimmy (Greg Hsu Kuang-han) finds himself adrift. Feeling devoid of the passion that first led to his success and fame within the video game industry, Jimmy sets out on a solo journey in Japan. In particular, Jimmy seeks to travel to the hometown of his first love, Ami (Kaya Kiyohara), a Japanese backpacker he met in high school while working at a karaoke parlor in his hometown of Tainan.
The film jumps between two periods in time of Jimmy’s life–Jimmy’s journey through Japan in the present as an adult, and the summer that Jimmy found himself falling for Ami. In contrast to his intellectual, calm manner as an adult, who is now completely fluent in Japanese, Jimmy was then a rash, impetuous high schooler. While Ami appeared to return his feelings at the time, and even taught him Japanese to build upon his interest in Japanese anime and manga, she also seemed hesitant to enter into a relationship. Jimmy suspected that this was because she had a boyfriend in Japan.
18×2 Beyond Youthful Days proves similar to other movies in the past decades about Taiwan-Japan romances. In many ways, the film echoes Wei Te-sheng’s 2008 Cape No. 7, not only because it is about a Taiwan-Japan cross-cultural romance, but also through common plot elements including a story that touches upon two different time periods, and the device of an undelivered love letter.
The shortcomings of 18×2 Beyond Youthful Days, ironically, are similar to that of Cape No. 7. Namely, the romance between Jimmy and Ami comes off as contrived and cookie-cutter, proceeding as a color-by-numbers love story.
This is to be contrasted with the movie’s sequences in the present. While Jimmy’s present-day journey through Japan involves some rather predictable encounters with a series of Japanese individuals, this version of Jimmy is at least far more interesting and complex than his 18-year-old equivalent. In fact, the 18-year-old Jimmy’s bland personality evokes that of Cape No. 7’s rebellious angry protagonist and, for that matter, the protagonist of any Japanese shonen manga.
Indeed, it is to the credit of Greg Hsu’s skillful performance as Jimmy that the two seem like completely different people. While multilingual films often prove uneven between scenes in multiple languages, Han is also to be praised for carrying scenes in Mandarin and Japanese equally well.
Still, it is the twist ending of 18×2 Beyond Youthful Days that ultimately makes it a story not of adolescent love, but of adults coming to grips with their adolescence, as the past is remembered through the lens of a first love. This recasts much of the movie in a different light, proving somewhat thematically reminiscent of Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters per Second–which came out a year prior to Cape No. 7, ironically enough. Even if 18×2 Beyond Youthful Days does not exactly prove to be a particularly artful love story, like Cape No. 7, it is a highly capable commercial romance.
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18×2 Beyond Youthful Days (Chinese: 青春18×2 通往有你的旅程 | Japanese: 青春18×2 君へと続く道)— Taiwan and Japan. Dialog in Japanese and Mandarin Chinese. Directed by Michihito Fujii. Running time 2hr 4min. First released 14 February 2024. Starring Greg Hsu Kuang-han, Kaya Kiyohara.
This article is part of Cinema Escapist’s dedicated coverage of the 2024 New York Asian Film Festival (NYAFF). 18×2 Beyond Youthful Days will have its North American premiere at the festival on Saturday July 20, 2024.
This article is also published in No Man Is An Island, an online publication focused on the connections between everyday life and politics. No Man Is An Island is brought to you by the team behind New Bloom Magazine.