World Premiere | In Competition
Japan, 2025, 127’, Japanese
Directed by: Matsui Daigo
Screenplay: Ueda Makoto
Cast: Ikeda Elaiza, Adachi Kei
Japanese romantic dramas with a time travel theme are common to the point of being a cliché. Daigo Matsui’s Rewrite initially heads down this all-too-familiar path. Based on a novel by Hojo Haruka, the film focuses on high schoolers in the seaside town of Onomichi, the childhood home of late director Obayashi Nobuhiko and the setting for many of his films. In fact, Rewrite pays homage to Obayashi’s 1983 time-travel coming-of-age classic The Girl Who Leaped Through Time.The script by Ueda Makoto, who also wrote the screenplay for the 2005 Katsuyuki Motohiro hit Summer Time Machine Blues, turns midway in an unexpected direction, however. What at first seems like another teen love drama, with a time traveler as the object of the heroine’s affections, becomes brain-twistingly complex, like a chess game that suddenly reveals itself as three-dimensional.
Matsui’s default setting as a director is comic, starting with his 2012 debut Afro Tanaka (an Udine FEFF selection), and the surprise developments in Rewrite start to border on slapstick. Still, his story of how youthful love can have reverberations well into adult life is anything but silly and recalls his best film to date, the 2022 romantic drama Just Remembering, in which time, if not time travel, also played a central role.
His heroine, Miyuki (Ikeda Elaiza), is a high school senior when a transfer student named Yasuhiko (Adachi Kei) comes to her class. There is something different, almost otherworldly about him and she soon finds out why. Appearing before her in the school library, he tells her he is from 300 years in the future and was inspired to make his journey across time by a novel from her era.
Miyuki keeps his secret and over the course of an eventful summer, she and Yasuhiko fall in love. Then, after taking a pill her time traveler has given her, she meets herself from ten years in the future, who tells her that the book Yasuhiko so admires is hers. All she has to do is write it. Soon after, Yasuhiko returns to his own era and Miyuki sets out to make the book a reality.
Flash forward ten years: Miyuki returns to Onomichi a best-selling novelist. Something of an outsider as a teenager, she is now a local celebrity and her old friends (who are really old acquaintances) urge her to come to the class reunion. First, though, she has to meet her younger self on the appointed date, but though she waits hours, the Miyuki of a decade ago doesn’t show.
Up this point the film has been mostly Miyuki’s, with Ikeda Elaiza’s layered performance smoothing her character’s teen-to-adult transition, as well as making her love for the elusive Yasuhiko more than a plot contrivance.
The pathos of lovers separated by time, perhaps forever, subsides as Miyuki discovers to her shock, starting at the reunion, that Yasuhiko’s secret was not hers alone. She doesn’t completely fade out of the picture, but her former classmates crowd into it.
The resulting complications could have descended into chaos, but Ueda is adept at juggling his profusion of subplots, while getting laughs from the flashbacks of Yasuhiko’s frantic attempt to straighten out his tangle of time loops.
The moral: If you mess with time, you’d better be good at timetables – or know someone who is.
GUEST:
MATSUI Daigo, director
OKADA Naoki, producer
Matsui Daigo
Matsui Daigo (b. 1985) founded his own theatre troupe, Gojiden, in 2008 and served as playwright, director and actor. In 2009 he became the youngest scriptwriter for public broadcaster NHK, working on the series drama Two Speakers. After that he continued to script and direct TV dramas, while making prize-winning short films. His first feature as a director, the quirky comedy Afro Tanaka, screened at the 14th edition of Udine FEFF. After that he made a series of films with teenaged protagonists. His new film Rewrite is his first venture into sci-fi.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
2012 – Afro Tanaka
2012 – Daily Lives of High School Boys
2013 – Sweet Poolside
2014 – Wonderful World End
2015 – Watashitachi no haa haa
2016 – Haruko Azumi Is Missing
2017 – Ice Cream and the Sound of Raindrops
2017 – You, Your, Yours
2020 – #HandballStrive
2021 – Just Remembering
2025 – Rewrite