Since the release of his debut feature ¡°And the Mud Ship Sails Away¡± in 2013, Hirobumi Watanabe has often played a struggling indie director in his own films as a comic meta-commentary on his career. But the real-life Watanabe has also won festival invitations and honors, including the best director award in the Japanese Cinema Splash section of the 2019 Tokyo International Film Festival for his film ¡°Cry,¡± in which he starred as a silent pig farm worker.
In Kah Wai Lim¡¯s ¡°Your Lovely Smile,¡± he has his first lead role in a film by someone else. However, he is once again playing a version of himself: a director named Watanabe who wears a T-shirt saying ¡°tensai¡± (¡°genius¡±) and tries to sell skeptical theater owners on his films like a door-to-door salesman.
Scripted by Lim, a Malaysian-born director long based in Osaka, ¡°Your Lovely Smile¡± has the feel of a Watanabe film by proxy with his distinctive brand of self-mocking humor but, instead of featuring his signature black-and-white minimalism, it is a color comedy with documentary-esque features. And it is laugh-out-loud funny ¡ª as are all but the most austere of Watanabe¡¯s own films.
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