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 — as are all but the most austere of Watanabe’s own films.