Starring: Ko Chen-tung, Michelle Chen Yan-hsi, Wan Wan, Steven Hao Shao-wen
Director: Giddens Ko Ching-teng
Category: IIB (Mandarin)
Its Chinese title is The Girl We Chased Together in Those Years, features characters called Boner, Cock and Groin, and draws cheap laughs with gags about nudity (at home) and masturbation (in the classroom).
Such attempts at crass comedy, however, belie the temperate tone of novelist-turned-filmmaker Giddens Ko Ching-teng's directorial debut.
As its more lyrical English title suggests, You Are the Apple of My Eye hedges its bets more on feelings than folly, as the rowdy comedy slowly gives way to a romantic drama dripping with melancholy about the dissipation of youthful loves and dreams at the onset of adulthood.
Based on the director's memoir about his teenage years, You Are the Apple of My Eye begins in 2005 with Ko Ching-teng (a taller, hunkier version of the real Ko, played by Ko Chen-tung) readying himself for a wedding.
Whose nuptials it is, the film doesn't reveal yet - as the movie goes back a decade to find Ko and his gang fooling about as high school students, pulling pranks while hankering for the attention of the pretty but prissy straight-A student Shen Jia-yi (Michelle Chen, below left with Ko).