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 be

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