Arrested Memory, the latest slyly soulful genre farce from Japanese indie maverick Sabu, was conceived almost 20 years ago and was nearly made as a local production in Germany, France, South Korea and Japan before it finally landed in Taiwan as a Chinese-language action-comedy. 

“Looking back, I feel that there is a right time for everything, and that all of those earlier opportunities and attempts didn’t work out just so that I could meet this team and make the film in Taiwan,” Sabu says. 

Despite the worldly peregrinations and its long gestation, the finished film is unmistakably a work by Sabu, a throwback in story and style to his energetic early breakthroughs like Dangan Runner (1996), Postman Blues (1997) and Monday (2000). Cue the mistaken identities, brash brushes with the yakuza, inspired dance sequences, stylized fight scenes filmed in Sam Peckinpah-esque slow-mo, spirals of coincidences, and a guilt-ridden hero in hapless pursuit of a happy ending.

Arrested Memory stars Taiwanese idol turned actor Ethan Juan as police detective Lee, a consummate badass who is hit with an early-onset dementia diagnosis just prior to being transferred to a new precinct. Before his new colleagues can divine his rapidly diminishing state, Lee is assigned to head up a huge new case: A local Japanese tycoon’s young son has disappeared (a deliberate riff on Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, Sabu says), and the kidnappers are demanding that the father hand over a large ransom in person. A plan is put into place for Lee to assume the place of the wealthy businessman, but once dressed in the magnate’s clothes and entrusted with a briefcase of his cash, the detective is hit by a wave of his now-chronic forgetfulness. Thus, he wanders into Taipei with no memory of his mission, his identity or why he happens to have millions of dollars on his person — and so begins a nocturne of pure instinct and adventure in which everything somehow goes both wrong and right.  

Sabu recalls that when he wrote the film in 2007, tough-guy cop films were all the rage in Japanese cinemas, while local media coverage had become fixated on rising cases of Alzheimer’s and dementia among the country’s rapidly aging population. 

“I thought it might be interesting if I could somehow put these things together — a really vicious cop who suddenly develops dementia and, through losing his memory, becomes very innocent and pure,” he says. “There would be a lot of comedy, but in some ways, it could also feel like an escape from his old self. In his blank-slate state, he might behave in a way that’s actually closer to who he really is and what he really feels.” 

For all its comedy of errors and extreme, random circumstance, the story hinges on a desire for authenticity and escape that Sabu believes is universal. 

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“In our daily lives, we all feel pressure from so many different things — work, family, and so on. At some point, you can start to feel that you are no longer really yourself,” he says. “If, through certain unexpected events, you get rid of those things, maybe you would then become more truthful to yourself. I wouldn’t necessarily say that you become happy, but you could feel reborn — almost like you have entered a new state, like coming out of a cocoon and becoming who you really are again. That was very much what I was thinking when I wrote the film.”

Sabu says he also felt some unexpected affinity with his protagonist while on set in Taiwan — his first time working in a production environment outside Japan. 

“I’ve been making films for more than 30 years, and when I work in Japan there is a certain easy, relaxed feeling — but maybe it had become too relaxed. Everyone understands exactly what I’m asking for, and that can get a little boring,” he explains.

“This time,” he adds, “I was the only Japanese person on the set. I came there alone and was working with people from a different language and culture. I felt a little lost, and it made me nervous. I had to stay on my toes at all times and constantly work hard to communicate across those differences — but in a good way. Making this film woke me up, and I was invigorated.” 

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