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.”