General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

My Missing Valentine

My Missing Valentine (Chinese: 消失的情人節) is a 2020 Taiwanese romantic fantasy comedy directed and written by Chen Yu-hsun, in which a fast-moving postal clerk loses a day of her life while the slow bus driver who loves her gains one. It stars Patty Lee as Yang Hsiao-chi and Liu Kuan-ting as A-Tai, runs 119 minutes, and was released in Taiwan on 18 September 2020.¹^•² The film led the 57th Golden Horse Awards with 11 nominations and won five prizes, including Best Narrative Feature and Best Director.³

Key fact	Detail
Original title / year	消失的情人節, 2020, Taiwan, 119 minutes, Mandarin and Taiwanese¹
Director and writer	Chen Yu-hsun; producers Yeh Jufeng and Lee Lieh; production company MandarinVision Co., Ltd.¹
Leads	Patty Lee as postal clerk Yang Hsiao-chi; Liu Kuan-ting as bus driver A-Tai; with Duncan Lai and Joanne Missingham⁴
Taiwan release	18 September 2020, distributed by Warner Bros.; 2020 box office NT$32,042,795²^•⁵
Golden Horse Awards (57th, 2020)	11 nominations, the most of that edition; won Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, and Best Visual Effects³
Other honors	Best Narrative Feature at the 2021 Taipei Film Awards; Black Dragon Critics Award and 3rd-place Mulberry Audience Award at the 2021 Udine Far East Film Festival⁶
Japanese remake	Nobuhiro Yamashita's 2023 remake, also known as One Second Ahead, One Second Behind, gender-swaps the central characters⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Yang Hsiao-chi has done everything a beat faster than everyone else since childhood, from starting races before the whistle to blinking before every photograph. Nearly 30 and single, she works the counter of a post office, where a slow-moving bus driver named A-Tai comes in every day to mail a single letter. On the eve of Valentine's Day a handsome dance teacher, Liu Wen-sen, asks her out, but she wakes the next morning to find that Valentine's Day has passed without her memory of it.¹^•⁸

The film is divided into two halves. The first follows Hsiao-chi as she reports to a police station that she has "lost a day" and searches for what happened. The second retells the same events from A-Tai's point of view: a man who has always been half a beat behind the world, so slow that he drives a bus limited to 40 km/h. On Valentine's Day he does not lose a day but gains one, waking to find the whole world frozen while he alone can move, and he spends the day with the unconscious Hsiao-chi, including a trip to the beach.⁹^•¹⁰

The two leads share a childhood history neither remembers at first: they met in the same hospital ward after a car accident that killed A-Tai's parents, and when Hsiao-chi was discharged he gave her one of two keys marked "038" belonging to his father, promising they would keep writing letters. His daily mailed letters and a post box opened with that key become the thread through which Hsiao-chi recovers the missing day.¹¹

Development and production

A twenty-year-old script. Chen Yu-hsun wrote the first version shortly after completing Love Go Go in 1997, originally under the title One Day (有一天), about a postal clerk who stamps one date too many and discovers a day has vanished from her life. He set the project aside for two decades, discouraged by the film market and his own uncertainty, and revived it after The Village of No Return (2017) when his producers encouraged him to rewrite it. The title changed because director Hou Chi-jan had already made a film called One Day; Chen chose Valentine's Day as the vanished day because it seemed the most amusing possibility.¹²

Chen changed the male lead from a painter to a bus driver, keeping the post office because the mailed letters express A-Tai's old-fashioned devotion. The frozen-world beach sequence grew out of a winter visit Chen made alone to the empty Fulong beach, where the stillness suggested a world that had stopped.¹²

Budget and shooting. The film was made for NT$40 million, less than Chen's earlier hit Zone Pro Site, with an NT$18 million government film subsidy; several crew members from The Village of No Return accepted reduced fees to return. A full post office set was built in Tamsui at a reported cost of NT$5 million, so convincing that local residents tried to use it. Filming took place in May 2019, with locations in New Taipei City including Tamsui, Xinzhuang, and Xindian.¹³^•¹⁴

Awards

At the 57th Golden Horse Awards in 2020 the film received 11 nominations, more than any other film that year, and won five: Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing (Lai Hsiu-hsiung), and Best Visual Effects. Its acting leads, Liu Kuan-ting and Patty Lee, were nominated for Best Leading Actor and Best Leading Actress but did not win.³^•⁹ The following year it won Best Narrative Feature, Best Director, Best Editing, and Best Visual Effects at the 23rd Taipei Film Awards, and at the 23rd Udine Far East Film Festival in Italy it took the Black Dragon Critics Award and third place in the Mulberry Audience Awards.⁶^•¹⁵ It also screened in the Open Cinema section of the 2020 Busan International Film Festival.⁶

Reception

Box office. The film opened in Taiwan on 18 September 2020 to a weak start, with first-day Taipei box office of NT$356,000 and NT$1.415 million over the first weekend, figures commentators called disappointing for a Warner Bros. release. Nominations for the Golden Horse Awards brought some recovery, but its 2020 total of NT$32,042,795 remained well behind contemporaneous Taiwanese romances such as My Missing Valentine's market rivals i, We Can Be Both and Your Name Engraved Herein.²^•¹⁶

Critical response. Reviewers generally praised the film's invention and craft. The Straits Times gave it 4 out of 5, calling its "visually ambitious, genre-bending film-making" rare and mature; In Review Online called it "a fine romantic comedy of the high concept variety"; and a No Man Is An Island review ranked it among the strongest Taiwanese romantic comedies of recent years, crediting its set pieces, script, and the two leads' performances.⁴^•¹⁰^•⁹

The film's premise also drew criticism. A South China Morning Post review written around the Japanese remake argued that a story in which a man spends a frozen day with a woman who cannot consent had become problematic in the post-#MeToo climate, and that its Golden Horse win had seemed a misstep on those grounds. Chen responded during the original release that A-Tai is written as an innocent in the mold of a fairy tale, that the character recognizes his behavior is approaching harassment and lets go, and that learning to wake up and let go matters more than the infatuation itself.⁷^•¹⁷

Japanese remake

Director Nobuhiro Yamashita remade the film in Japanese, released in 2023 under the international title One Second Ahead, One Second Behind (Japanese title 1秒先の彼), with Masaki Okada, Kaya Kiyohara, and Rion Fukumuro, and a screenplay by Kankuro Kudo. The remake relocates the story to Kyoto and gender-swaps the central pair, making the fast, always-a-step-ahead character a male post office worker and the slow one a shy female photographer, a change the SCMP reviewer read as an attempt to address the consent concerns raised by the original, though the review judged the remake as problematic as its source.⁷^•¹⁸

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2019 to 2020 › Released in 2020

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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