‘18×2 Beyond Youthful Days’: Formulaic tearjerker hits the road for true love

Medical melodramas generally either give you the diagnosis, fatal or otherwise, up front or save it for later in the story. In the former category is Michihito Fujii’s 2020 drama, “The Last Ten Years,” which signals the young protagonist’s fate — she only has a decade left to live — right in the title. In the latter is the director’s new tearjerker, “18×2 Beyond Youthful Days.”

Based on a travel essay by Jimmy Lai and scripted by Fujii, this Japan-Taiwan co-production delays its big reveal until nearly 90 minutes in. The intent may have been to heighten the poignancy, but for most of the film, I thought I was watching the story of a barely reciprocated teenage crush.

Hsu Kuang-han, who also goes by Greg Han and headlined the 2023 Taiwanese hit “Marry My Dead Body,” stars as the protagonist at ages 18 and 36. Kaya Kiyohara, who was brilliant as a romance-savvy teenager in the 2021 Koji Maeda comedy “You’re Not Normal Either!” plays his older love interest who consigns him to the “friend zone” from day one.

These two not only lack romantic chemistry but are also playing in what are effectively two parallel stories, leading to a strange feeling of emotional disconnection. Their characters may be in the same frame, but one is not entirely present.

We first meet Hsu’s Jimmy as a deposed game company founder and CEO. Adrift and alone, he feels he has lost everything until he comes across an old postcard and decides to visit the writer’s hometown in Fukushima Prefecture.

Flash back to Jimmy as a gawky high school senior in Tainan, a city in southern Taiwan, spending his summer working at a rundown karaoke joint called Kobe Karaoke. It has a friendly, family-like atmosphere, though the mustachioed owner scolds Jimmy for his chronic lateness.

One day, a Japanese backpacker named Ami (Kiyohara) asks the owner for a job, despite speaking zero Mandarin. A lover of all things Japanese and fluent in the language, he hires her and orders Jimmy, who has picked up a bit of Japanese as a manga and anime fan, to help her learn the ropes.

This set-up is on the contrived side — Ami, who has lost her wallet, could have presumably called home for financial assistance — but the opening scenes have a buoyant, idyllic feel. And when it becomes known that she’s a skilled watercolorist, the outgoing and talented Ami quickly becomes a local celebrity and wins Jimmy’s heart. But she keeps him at a distance, with an older-sisterly smile.

So why, 18 years later, is Jimmy riding on a slow train in the Fukushima winter? The film supplies hints, with Ami, so determined to live out her world traveler dreams, becoming a kind of life coach to the unfocused Jimmy, who later uses her words and example on his drive for corporate success.

True love, however, eludes him, until … well, let’s leave the rest to the imagination. I found the film’s last act formulaic, right down to the swelling violins. But “18×2 Beyond Youthful Days” also illustrates why its two leads have won acting awards, a slew in the case of Hsu.

He deserves kudos especially for switching from adolescence to early middle age and back again with little more than changes in hair style, wardrobe and attitude. Too bad he can’t show the rest of us how to effortlessly roll back the years.