‘Masked Hearts’: Catharsis comes out of familial discord

From his 2005 feature debut “Bare-assed Japan” to the 2011 film “Mitsuko Delivers,” Yuya Ishii made scrappy indie films with a raucous comic edge that were hits on the festival circuit. Then, with his 2013 hit “The Great Passage,” about a geeky editor (Ryuhei Matsuda) struggling to make a new dictionary and find love, Ishii shifted gears to more serious and commercial fare.

With “Masked Hearts,” a comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family, Ishii has returned to his indie roots and not only with foul-mouthed dialogue: His protagonist, Hanako Orimura (Mayu Matsuoka), is a fledgling film director who has a bruising brush with the industry’s mainstream.

Ishii, who wrote the original script, is coming from a personal and painfully real place — hopefully one not as tough on the ego as Hanako’s. As played by Matsuoka, she is another of Ishii’s likeably indomitable heroines, though she is also reminiscent of the lonely, nerdy protagonist of Matsuoka’s 2017 breakout comedy, “Tremble All You Want.”

We first meet Hanako midway through the pandemic, when she has been commissioned by a film company to direct a low-budget feature based on her mother’s sudden disappearance two decades earlier. While she has strong opinions about how to shoot it, they come more from instinct than logic. This draws the scorn of Arakawa (a wonderfully hateful Takahiro Miura), an assistant director who laughingly dismisses her every idea. The film’s smarmy producer, Hara (the single-named Megumi), tries to calm troubled waters, but she is obviously on Arakawa’s side.

If “Masked Hearts” had continued in this vein, it would have joined the short list of smart comedies about Japan’s movie business. Instead, the story broadens to encompass the whole Orimura clan: Dad (Koichi Sato), who is battling terminal stomach cancer, second son Yuji (Ryuya Wakaba), a fervent Catholic who has converted Dad, and first son Seiichi (Sosuke Ikematsu), who lords it over the others as the eldest while groveling to his boss (a delightfully despicable Kengo Kora).

We also meet Masao Date (Masataka Kubota), a once-aspiring actor Hanako first encounters as he is trying to break up a street fight and getting a bloody nose for his trouble. His “Abenomask” — the ridiculously small masks handed out under the aegis of late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — instantly turns red, one of the film’s several running gags. Now a worker in a slaughterhouse, Masao is a damaged soul who immediately develops a crush on Hanako. Rather improbably, she halfway reciprocates.

Though it has narrative throughlines, “Masked Hearts” unfolds like a series of set pieces. Some — such as Dad’s attempt to cancel the cellphone contract of his vanished wife, only to be foiled by a company functionary (played to rigid perfection by the single-named Shuri) — are like standalone playlets.

Similar to Ishii’s patchy early work, “Masked Hearts” tries to hit big emotional notes while its broad comic tone undermines them. But when Hanako unleashes her ire at her father and brothers, who have ignored uncomfortable truths for years, the effect is cathartic.

As Hanako, Matsuoka reels off insults with a fluency that is funny and an anger that is biting. She embodies the Japanese title “Ai ni Inazuma,” which translates as “Lightening in Love” — though in this melodrama of familial discord and reconciliation, the bolts hit everyone, Hanako first and foremost.