For fun, attendees were invited “to come show off as their favorite human-robot hybrid” for a Cyborg Party following Cyborg She/Boku no kanojo wa saibôgu at Japan Society’s Japan Cuts: Festival of New Japanese Film. Some of the outfits were imaginative beyond the title cyborg, or robotic or bionic woman. She (Haruka Ayase) possesses super strength and speed, eats enough for ten, can do a three-sixty with her pretty head as well as project scenes distant in time or space like R2-D2. However, above it all is the young lady who shows up mysteriously then goes away only to come back exactly a year later. That she is to be a savior-sacrifice who must be laboriously reconstituted from her memory chip six decades and more in the future, will itself be part of the forgivably confusing but delightful wrap-up.

Directing a Japanese cast in his own screenplay, Korean Jae-Yong Kwak in effect divides his exactly two hours into two sections. The opening one introduces nice but lonely university student Jiro Kitamura (Keisuke Koide). He works at a burger place, shares his incongruously nifty rooftop house with pet iguana Raoul and the suppressed memories of a village childhood with grandma, and buys himself a present to celebrate his twentieth birthday eating out alone.

A strange attractive young woman flirtatiously eyes him at Daimaru Department Store and after leaving with unpaid-for clothing and shoes, joins him at the restaurant, leaves with him, again without paying, and the two share a wonderful evening of adventure and friendship. Upset that some boyfriend didn’t want to see her anymore because she is way too tough and unpredictable, she gets Jiro to close his eyes while she goes away a century into the future.

This expository falling-in-love soon grows cloying and cutesy light-novel-for-teens-and-young-adults. There are okay joke moments with her culinary ingredients and birthday-cake-and-champagne copycat routine, or a teacher’s (Megumi Sato) chalk missiles, in addition to puzzlers like a visual projection of the hero with useless arms in a wheelchair “sixty-five years from now” (Rokurô Naya). There is a nice scene of a foggy trip back in time to grandma and cat Raoul, marred by sentimental music; and there are touches of homage, from Terminator’s arrivals from the future to Back to the Future, from Oz’s Tin Woodman’s acquiring through action humanness with a heart and soul, to Japanese mangas.

As the returned woman learns the tics of behavior, even to dancing “the Robot” and experiencing the green-eyed monster, she acts with foreknowledge -- more accurately, “afterknowledge” -- to avert human emotional distress, as with a child about to be run over or a nut with a knife in a girls’ school. There is, too, unwise teen slapstick that needs cutting: too much of a TV newsman (Fumiyo Kohinata) at said school, a few Keystone Kops, a comical gasoline-swigging gunman (Hiromasa Taguchi).

Koide has little to work with as hapless hero, and it is Ayase’s nameless heroine who engages the audience upon her return. The “earlier” man who rejected the sweet young thing who comes on awfully strong is explained, along with her reason for being here and choosing Jiro in the first place.

SPOILER ALERT

All will be brought to a head in a wonderfully generated earthquake which levels present-day Tokyo and occasions self-sacrifice and remorse. A new skyline will rise, and, as clarified in the future, sixty-some-odd years go into rebuilding a woman as well, from memory up. Lucky for laughter, unto death’s last birthday she loves, and is either programmed for or simply humanly delighted by, the old face-in-the-cake celebration.

(Released by Intercontinental Video; not rated by MPAA.)