Daigo Matsui might be described as Japan’s equivalent to John Hughes, the director of “The Breakfast Club,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and other classic films about American teens in the 1980s.
Like Hughes, Matsui finds comedy in his adolescent characters, beginning with his 2013 “Daily Lives of High School Boys,” but he is also sympathetic with their problems and schemes, however idiotic or impractical they may seem to adults. In the 2015 film, “Our Huff and Puff Journey,” for example, four high school girls pedal their commuter bikes from Kyushu to Tokyo to see their favorite band — disasters and adventures ensue.
Matsui’s latest, “#Handball Strive,” is both a typical coming-of-age story and a trendy social commentary, focusing on how a single photo on social media can instantly change its taker's life, for better and worse. His teenage lead, Masao (Seishiro Kato), finds an old photo of himself playing handball that reminds him of happier days, before his life was upended by the powerful earthquakes that hit Kumamoto in 2016. He posts the image on Instagram and it goes viral, prompting Masao and a pal to begin staging handball photos and videos for social media, and even inventing a phony team.