“I will never forget you,” lovers say to each other. The truth is that sooner or later, almost everyone is forgotten. In fact, many people you’ve met, from your kindergarten classmates to that sloshed guy at the bar last night, have forgotten you already. If you ran into them on the street today, they might be able to place your face, but probably won’t remember your name. That’s if you’re lucky; most likely they’ll just walk on by, oblivious.
That’s the dilemma, in extremis, of the heroine of Horie Kei’s bittersweet teen romance Forget Me Not. Third-year high school student Oribe Azusa (Hayami Akari) is cute and vivacious, and nobody – not even her own father – can remember the least little thing about her.
Azusa goes through life constantly reintroducing herself to people, until she is ready to give up on the human race altogether.
Then a boy on a bicycle knocks her down and breaks through whatever negative force field surrounds her. The boy, Hayama Takashi (Murakami Nijiro), is in the same high school and grade, but a different homeroom class. He becomes her confidante, her defender and, finally, her boyfriend, vowing to never forget her.
With a script by Horie and Okazaki Satoko, is based on Hirayama Mizuho’s fantasy novel of the same title, the film smooths over its contradictions, such as how Azusa, the forever stranger, manages to walk into class every day without drawing the attention of her teacher and classmates. She is anonymous, not invisible. One imagines the poor girl doomed to do a self-introduction daily, but we never see it.
Why has Azusa been condemned to such a maddening fate?
She tells Takashi that at the end of her second year of high school, “my family and friends began to forget me.” No sign that she somehow incurred the wrath of whatever gods might be out there.
But Forget Me Not aims to engage the emotions, not the logic centers – and it does, mainly due to the casting of Hayami as Azusa.
A former member of the idol ensemble Momoiro Clover (now renamed Momoiro Clover Z), Hayami has been concentrating on acting and modeling since “graduating” from the group in 2011 at the tender age of 16.
Unlike fellow ex-idols Maeda Atsuko and Oshima Yuko, who were both former member of girl group AKB48, Hayami didn’t immediately segue into big roles in films with name directors, but had to struggle to establish her acting career, landing her first feature lead in Yakumo Saiji’s 2014 teen romance My Pretend Girlfriend as the superficially bold, romantically deluded and finally enigmatic title heroine.
As Azusa, Hayami again inhabits her character totally, giving her not just a breakable heart but an air of loneliness and wariness that Takashi’s vows of eternal remembrance never quite dispel. Azusa wants to hope it’s possible, but she has been wiped from one too many memory banks to easily believe that his is different.
As played by Murakami, who starred in Kawase Naomi’s 2014 Cannes competition entry Still the Water, the slight, shaggy-haired Takashi looks and acts younger than his seventeen years.
He’s nice, well-meaning and can, at first, barely comprehend Azusa’s situation, let alone her emotions. He progresses as their relationship deepens, but not far beyond his noisy family and his all-too-normal friends. Then he too start to forget. Will he drift back to his old life – or remain faithful to his vow to remember Azusa?