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.”
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