Director: Kah Wai Lim
Screenplay: Kah Wai Lim
Starring: Hirobumi Watanabe, Shogen, Hikaru Hirayama
Country: Japan
Running Time: 103 minutes
Year: 2022
A bittersweet, hilarious, enlightening and inspirational road trip through Japanese arthouse cinemas with independent filmmaker Hirobumi Watanabe, who also struggles to release his own movies in real life. This delightful minimalist micro-budget dramedy ironically and truthfully depicts a sorrowful post-Covid situation in Japanese cinemas, the rapidly changing film culture and the newly (re)discovered habits of spectators as an unyielding optimist Hirobumi painstakingly and stubbornly strives to invent clever distribution methods while keeping on striving to make movies.
Micro-budget can be a fascinating area. As soon as you can throw even a bit of money at a production, it can cover a few sins. At this level though, it’s truly raw and there’s nowhere to hide. Hirobumi Watanabe’s Your Lovely Smile is not an ambitious tour de force; he films pretty straight down the middle of the road. And that works.
Much of the opening act relies on the screenplay, which has just the right amount of fizz. Its gentle humour is often downright hilarious if you catch its drift. A slacker comedy, perhaps if Kevin Smith did Alan Partridge; all well intentioned if hopelessly naive.
Thankfully it doesn’t out stay its welcome, switching gears into a road movie with a dreamy thread running through. A valuable one too. Under the auspices of trying to present a series of his own esoteric films, he travels to various Japanese arthouse cinemas. Invariably failing to convince the owners, they are in fact, playing themselves. Some clearly enjoyed the experience immensely and that good-natured banter is infectious. But it’s bittersweet too. Seeing these little picture-houses dealing with the pandemic slump in various ways is where the film finds its heart. Meanwhile, for international audiences, it’s wonderful seeing a side of Japan that would seldom find itself in the mainstream.
There’s a final twist in this lively little film. The credits are given over to brief interview segments with the cinema owners.
EXTRA FEATURES
- Interview with director Lim Kah Wai (29 minutes)
Leave a Reply