Teenagers front and center for a quasi-coming-of-age romance that clearly got knocked on the head, reports Elizabeth Kerr.

Teenagers and young adults have graced many a silver screen over the years, but the last decade or so has seen a noticeable boom in teen-driven content. In books and on television as well, the youthful among us have demanded more attention. Whether that's a result of a generation that has mastered technologies that allow them communicate their wants and needs' maturation or big media consolidating and actively searching out new markets is anyone's guess. But there's no denying the omnipresence of "tween" programming. A glance through American network The CW's TV schedule would lead anyone to believe that those over 24 years are not welcome on its airwaves. Talk about programming by demographics.

And therein lies the rub. You can tinker and research and test screen all you like but there's really no way to tell what's going to catch on with that fickle and rapidly changing audience - the constructed and continued popularity of Twins notwithstanding. The success of the Twilight novels and Justin Bieber (really, who is this kid and why is he writing an autobiography at 16?) likely caught publisher Little Brown and Island Records as much by surprise as it did the rest of us.

Movies are even trickier. More than any other type of film targeted at any other moviegoer, films for teens and young adults live and die by how well their content speaks to the audience. Think about it: sci-fi diehards will see Tron: Legacy regardless of bad reviews, if only so that they can slag it themselves. Devotees of rom-coms will sit through endless Jennifer Aniston/Katherine Heigl dreck even though they know it's delivering a garbage message. Not so with teens. Their disposable income is valuable and they won't hesitate to warn friends of a film. And they can do it faster than you or I can turn on our laptops.

Naturally, young adult content varies widely from place to place. Hollywood tends to focus on angst and healthy doses of rebellion (Juno, Superbad) or fantasy (Gossip Girl). Korean and Japanese filmmakers favor melodrama and tragedy (The Classic, Sky of Love). In Taiwan it's all about personal pre-graduation sexual identity crises (Summer's Tail, Eternal Summer). So with school starting up again what last hurrah do cinemas hold for our future leaders?

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, by American writing and directing team Gabrielle Zevin and Hans Canosa, a mash-up of every teen cliche imaginable - and a few bonuses just because. The duo's only previous credit is the independent Conversations with Other Women, but that film won a prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival, so maybe that's the reason Zevin's book, upon which this is based, has been inexplicably transplanted to Tokyo.

Set over the course of one school year at the Tokyo American School, Amnesiac starts off with a hilarious bang. Naomi (popular TV star Horikita Maki) takes a tumble down some stairs and bumps her head (you know she's bumped her head because there's big, square bandage on her forehead in the ambulance). In the emergency room she's diagnosed with Looney Tunes-style "retrograde amnesia," and in hysterical Japanese fashion, four (!) doctors admit her for a week. It seems Naomi has blanked on everything since around the sixth grade.

Naturally this results in a massive personality shift that her best friend and yearbook co-editor Mirai (J-pop star Tegoshi Yuya), would-be gaijin boyfriend Ace (Star Trek's Anton Yelchin), and dad (Watabe Atsuro) can't get a handle on. Naomi is suddenly drawn to theater, short hair, resident high school lesbian Alice (Emma Roberts, the upcoming Scream 4), and troubled bad boy Yuji (Matsuyama Kenichi, the upcoming adaptation of Murakami Haruki's Norwegian Wood) - who telegraphs "troubled" by wearing a toque every single day.

Inside a rote, infuriating narrative are a lot of dense themes, even though the film Amnesiac is a seriously sanitized version of Zevin's YA novel. In that, Naomi is on the pill and her parents went through a vicious divorce. Here her romance with Ace is far more chaste and her mother tragically died when she was a child.

But Canosa and Zevin cram in the reasonably heavy themes nonetheless, themes that there are room for in a book, but not so much in a film. Amnesiac touches on the fantasy of starting one's life over with a blank slate; not having a past to haunt you; how we, and teens in particular, navigate the waters of peer expectation and what it means to have none; the thrill of seeing the very core essence of a person or situation; and (natch) identity issues. By forcing all of it into the film, Canosa and Zevin wind up with a series of interconnected and achingly dull "scenes" that only tenuously add up to a cohesive film. A judicious editor should have been on hand to help Zevin censor herself and perhaps save us from a film that's too long for its familiar material.

The cast is game, if blandly appealing, and the only real acting in the film comes courtesy of veteran Watabe. The most notable thing about this Fujifilm ad that doubles as cinema is ultimately its lack of young adult conflict. Amnesiac's international school is a haven of progressive tolerance and ethnic and national harmony and its vision of expatriate education in Japan isn't worth much. It simply doesn't ring true (for any high school really) and for Hong Kong kids that have lived with international schools their whole lives it could be downright comedic. The yearbook at the core of the story is the size of a telephone directory.

Niggling details aside, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac's biggest flaw is its lead. When Naomi discovers she has the opportunity to recreate herself in an image she truly wants, she chooses to be alternatively selfish, callous, or spineless depending on the situation; the message is lost when you want to take her over your knee and spank her. Naomi's final redemption feels less like she found satisfying closure and more like she got off the hook. Will it speak to its intended audience? Who knows, but if it doesn't you'll be sure to know about it on Twitter.

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac opened in Hong Kong Thursday.

(HK Edition 09/04/2010 page4)