My Missing Valentine is made with the acknowledgment that romantic comedies are super hard to make well. Romantic comedy, arguably speaking, is the most formulaic genre. The guy and the girl meet, fall for each other, fight through their differences and end up together. Its simplicity just so happens to be its difficulty. Taiwanese Director Chen Yu-hsun tackles the genre with an artistic ambition and shakes up the rom-com formula with a central mystery.
The story is about Yang Hsiao-chi, who has always been one step ahead of everybody at anything and as an unfortunate side effect, has been out of sync with the world around her. She works as a postal worker in Taipei and longs to be in a relationship.
On the eve of Valentine's Day, a handsome dance teacher Liu Wen-sen asks Yang out, but much to her surprise, she wakes up the next morning realizing Valentine's Day has passed without her.
Chen Yu-hsun's script cleverly spins the traditional rom-com meet-cute and keeps the audience guessing. The audience does not know what is happening as the typical rom-com sequence is out of wack. We don't even know who the couple we are supposed to be rooting for is. As things are pursued and revealed, the mood becomes increasingly romantic and the film charmingly whisks you away into its magical reality with surprises in store.
Newcomer Patty Lee, a TV presenter, has great comedic timing. She plays her character's yearning in an adorable believable way and shows great range in her interplay with male co-stars Liu Kuan-ting and Duncan Chow.
The production design cleverly uses indie comedy quirks and its available resources to create something relatively epic for its story. Our heroine yearningly listens to a dating-themed radio show that wheels in and literally manifests behind her apartment window. When the story shifts from the cityscape of Taipei to the ocean town of Dongshi, there is a genuine cathartic release and a romantic atmosphere emanates.
My Missing Valentine is a cute feel-good movie that is executed with craft and an eye for detail. I would recommend it to any movie fan dying for a good romantic comedy during the lockdown and wouldn't mind reading subtitles. The Taiwanese accent has a deadpan cartoon quality that is inherently comedic-sounding which I believe will come through for English speakers.
I intend to see it again myself. I mistakenly watched it with no Chinese subtitles thinking it'd be in Mandarin but there was a lot of Taiwanese that is spoken that went over my head.
This is my favorite Chinese language film in 2021 thus far. It's been nominated in many categories at the Golden Horse awards and could possibly stay on my Top Ten by the end of the year.
