'One Second Ahead, One Second Behind': Rom-com remake benefits from fantastical twist

Nobuhiro Yamashita’s gently quirky, overly long fantasy rom-com “One Second Ahead, One Second Behind” is a remake of the 2020 Taiwanese hit “My Missing Valentine.”

Scripted by veteran multitalent Kankuro Kudo, the film reverses the gender of the protagonist, now a male post office worker played by Masaki Okada, who has appeared in everything from lamebrain comedies to the award-winning “Drive My Car” (2021). It also changes the setting to summer in and around Kyoto.

Having not seen “My Missing Valentine,” I don’t know how much Kudo localized the story, including a second-act reveal that sheds light on what was hiding in plain sight.

It’s enough to say the film puts a fresh spin on a famous episode from Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone,” while taking common tropes found in local films about unrequited love to extremes both absurd and heartwarming (the former predominating).

Okada plays the bright-eyed Hajime, who has always lived a step — or a rash leap — ahead of the crowd: buzzing through tests as a kid and getting failing grades, and delivering the mail on a zooming scooter and losing his license for speeding. He still has a job, however, behind the counter of a small post office.

The good-looking Hajime easily attracts women but is quickly dumped once they discover what a loser he is. Shortly after a female coworker breaks off their brief relationship, he encounters singer-songwriter Sakurako (Rion Fukumuro) busking underneath a bridge.

Her soulful love songs, which name check Kyoto landmarks, win his heart: He is a fanatic Kyoto loyalist (or rather snob), despite being born in nearby Uji. Soon he is rapidly climbing the ladder of romance, culminating in a morning dash to a big date with Sakurako.

The date never happens: Hajime has somehow lost a day, with Sunday now inexplicably Monday. The mystery deepens when, passing a photography shop window, he sees his portrait photo, which he doesn’t remember sitting for. The photographer, he learns, is Reika Chosokabe (Kaya Kiyohara) who lives in coastal Amanohashidate, long famed as a beauty spot.

Determined to find out what is going on, Hajime heads for Amanohashidate to find Reika, holding a key for a post office box he has been told they share, a fact that he has also forgotten.

Here, after this long, sitcom-ish buildup, the story makes a sharp turn toward fantasy, with Reika taking center stage — and immediately becomes more interesting.

Though a slow-poke since childhood, Reika is a passionate photographer — one of many in local films, with their art (never merely a “hobby” or “job”) serving as a signifier for sensitivity and cool. She is also something of a stalker, however, which the film codes as understandable given the purity of her feelings for her subject. (If her character were a man, needless to say, he would be classed as a creep.)

“One Second Ahead, One Second Behind” strains to elicit audience sighs and tears from Reika’s inability to say what is in her heart. But what is charming in the blushing heroine of a seishun eiga (“teen film”) feels passingly strange in an adult woman. And is Hajime, that doofus, really worth her efforts to make his missing day the best? To give her credit, though, Reika comes up with methods even sci-fi titan Serling could have never imagined.