Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2010

American director Hans Canosa has made a name for himself as a filmmaker who takes chances. His brilliant Conversations with Other Women (2005) was shot entirely in split screen, and in Dareka ga Watashi ni Kisu wo Shita, he takes the celebrated novel Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac (by screenwriting collaborator Gabrielle Zevin) and transposes it to an international school in Tokyo. The story revolves around yearbook editor Naomi (Maki Horikita), who must set about rediscovering herself and reassessing all the things and people in her life after losing her memory in a fall. Needless to say, her American boyfriend Ace (Anton Yelchin) is more than a little disappointed after the “new” Naomi finds that she has little in common with him. Though aimed at the adolescent crowd, the movie hits all the right emotional notes and employs ingenious filmmaking techniques to amplify the characters’ feelings and ideas. Canosa has walked a careful line between cultures and come out triumphantly. Note: the dialogue is about 70 percent in Japanese with the rest in English. (123 min)