Attention: this one’s for all the Obayashi heads out there. Daigo Matsui’s Rewrite begins in a place we know well: a high school girl named Miyuki learns that the new transfer student (Yasuhiko) is actually a time traveler from 300 years into the future. The two of them, bonding over this secret, spend a magical 20 days together before he must inevitably return to his own time. Before he goes, she learns (after briefly visiting herself in 10 years time) that she will write a book about their time together, and that the boy will someday read this book and that will inspire his journey. All she has to do is write the book and in 10 years time, the time loop will be perfect. And so she does, and when the inevitable day arrives… nothing happens. This snippet of plot accounts for the first 20 minutes of Rewrite, the rest of the film follows Miyuki as she attempts to understand what happened (or didn’t happen) and why.
Rewrite‘s central scenario is obviously inspired by The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, a novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui from 1967 which was famously adapted into film by Nobuhiko Obayashi in 1983. The source material has spawned a number of other adaptations since, on both television, stage, and film, including a celebrated anime by Mamoru Hosada (which is actually a sequel to the original story, though it follows basically the same structure), but Rewrite seems most inspired by Obayashi’s interpretation. The title of the book Miyuki writes is Girl Leaps Time; the film is set in Obayashi’s hometown of Onomichi, the setting for a number of his greatest movies, including The Girl Who Leapt through Time (which is as much a showcase for his beloved home as it is a sci-fi teen romance); there are multiple references to the air around the time-traveler being filled with a faint scent of lavender, a running motif of Obayashi’s adaptation.
But more than mere homage, the complications of the time loop that Matsui and screenwriter Makoto Ueda (the modern master of time travel narratives behind Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River, here adapting a novel by Haruka Hôjô) spin go far beyond simple sci-fi mechanics into questioning the very idea of authorship, both of novels and films (and film adaptations of novels and other films), and of our own memories. It would spoil too much to go into many details at this point, so it’ll have to suffice it to say that every twist and turn of Rewrite are a delight to engage with, opening up new ways to understand not just the facts of the film’s world, but what it means to live in a reality mediated by stories that can change and disappear and remake (ahem, rewrite) themselves with or without our knowledge. For as much as Matsui locks us down in space, the Onomichi of our memory of another person’s story, he also sets us adrift in time: not between possible futures or alternate presents, but into a past that contains as many possibilities as there are people to experience it.
Published as part of Fantasia Festival 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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