A post office worker is waiting for her Mr Right but then things go (slightly) wrong on Valentine’s Day…
My Missing Valentine is the parallel stories of two people. Yang Hsiao-chi (Patty Lee) is a normal girl. She has a repetitive job at a post office and day after day, she meets many kinds of customers, and buys cheap fried fish at a food stall to take home for her noodle dinners at a humble rental home.
One day, she meets a handsome man – Wenson (Duncan Lai) – at a park as he’s running a free dancing class for the elderly. They quickly fall for each other and make an appointment to meet on Valentine’s Day. On the day of their date, Yang wakes up and is shocked to realise that she has somehow lost the whole day. Meanwhile, A Tai (Liu Kuan-ting) recalls his childhood when he met a little girl who helped him feel less upset and lonely. But as his story opens up, we learn more about his connection to Yang – and her missing day.
At first, veteran director Chen Yu-hsun’s movie feels like a typical rom-com in which there is a normal girl blindly falling for a handsome prince; everything seems too good to be true but still they quickly start dating. But what makes My Missing Valentine more interesting is how Chen twists his tale. He makes the audience ask questions and desire to dig deeper into what – exactly – is going on. You cannot stop watching until these riddles are solved as the director plays with the concept of time. This concept of “of losing a day” is unfamiliar in Asian films and time, in this film, is something we can almost see, touch, and lose – far from the familiar sense that time is an abstract concept.
There’s a sense that time moves faster for one person, and slower for another, and it heightens a sense of loneliness, and that something in missing. Yang’s world moves quicker than others so it seems that she forgets to enjoy life and to look around. She seems lost all the time. A part of this girl has gone, somewhere, and she can never get it back. But A Tai, the slower man, is no less lonely than her, but he seems happier. He is not lost in this wide world because he has still found a sense of happiness and has set goals in life. His unconditional love might seem a little bit creepy but it is naïve and even beautiful.
The parallel stories form two parts of a larger whole, like two halves that complete a character. It is why Yang and A Tai are matched. One is the missing piece of the other. The story of A Tai completes Yang’s story as he fills in her memories and My Missing Valentine is a film that’s all about memories. Its colours reminds us of the past, making it easy to recall our own memories, and the fact that some pain and sorrow are never gone, and that unanswered questions still annoyingly linger in people’s lives. But it’s the slow rhythm of the film that brings deeper emotions, humour, and imagination – and along with those comes thoughts of love, heartbreak and even gentle laughter.