Unless you’ve been to any small-scale Japanese film festivals in recent years (or picked up Third Window Films’ ‘New Directors from Japan’ boxset), you probably haven’t heard of independent film director Hirobumi Watanabe. The inhabitants of Your Lovely Smile by-and-large haven’t heard of him either.
Here Watanabe plays himself, in a gently satirical examination of the Japanese filmmaking scene from fellow independent director Lim Kah-wai. The script was largely improvised, with Watanabe unaware of what he’d be made to do each day on set. It’s a project that developed and evolved as it was produced, and this is evident for better and for worse.
The tightest, most consistently engaging section is the opening act, in which Watanabe, down on his luck without any active project, meets with potential participants and producers for a new one. These scenes strike a winning tempo, Watanabe’s warm, unassuming charm married with delightful in-jokes about the state of play of Japanese film internationally. If you’re a seasoned viewer, you’ll be thoroughly tickled. If you’re new to Japanese independent cinema, you’ll be drawn in to the extent that you’ll feel a drive to seek out more films like it (of which distributor Third Window Films have plenty).
Notably, these scenes stem from the narrative concept that Lim had when embarking on this project, that Watanabe plays himself and needs to get a film made. The subsequent chapters (for the film is divided such) emerged as the duo shot and developed the previous ones. There’s a sense of losing a film in order to search for a new one, and whilst this is narratively and thematically appropriate, it may lose some viewers.
Watanabe wanders from theatre to theatre, looking for somewhere to screen his films, and this film itself feels on hold. It’s a poignant exploration. Japan’s film industry faced a difficult time in the pandemic, when this film was shot. Unlike other countries, theatres remained open, but audiences dwindled, and, in turn, filmmakers struggled to find venues that would play their work. Lim takes the time here to visit many of Japan’s mini theatres, and in a credits reel he and Watanabe interview the theatres’ owners, passionate people with storied histories to tell of their proudly independent picture houses. These are the human sides of cinema in all their roadblocks and stumbles.
Amidst cine-reflexivity, Your Lovely Smile blossoms into a surprisingly tender examination of the isolation involved in pursuing one’s passion. Watanabe gives a remarkably vulnerable performance, sitting naked in a bathtub first alone, then with a female counterpart (Hikaru Hirayama, in a striking debut film performance). Midway through production, the director decided the on-screen Watanabe needed a love interest, and in practice it’s the film’s most profound element.
Lim fully embraces sentimentality here, the two waltzing around theatres, smiling at each other across studios. It seems tangential initially, like a different film encroaching on what we started out with, but the more we’re forced to sit with these two artists expressing recognition of each other (one a filmmaker, the other a dancer), the more it feels as essential and core to the project as the meta-comedy and the documentary.
It’s ultimately a simple message in a refreshingly simple film. That if just one person recognises and understands you and what you do, maybe it’s all worth it, maybe there’s a real human connection that you’ve managed to build through your art. Maybe that person to Watanabe and Lim is you if you choose to watch Your Lovely Smile. Perhaps that recognition, seeing and being seen, is what cinema, at its heart, is all about. Long may it live.
Your Lovely Smile is available now on Blu-ray from Third Window Films
