‘The Chatterboxes’: ‘A comedy of errors finds a common language

“The Chatterboxes,” Ken Kawai’s scruffy and cynical crowd-pleaser, is a linguistic comedy of errors with some unusual players. In one corner is Kazuhiko Koga (Kazuyoshi Kezuka), the deaf owner of an appliance store in the suburbs of Tokyo. In the other is Rifat (Murat Cicek), a Kurdish immigrant who’s about to open a restaurant in the neighborhood.

They don’t get off to a good start, as a misunderstanding over a broken lightbulb in Kazuhiko’s shop nearly escalates into a full-on street brawl between the two men and their respective friends. Unable to communicate directly — Kazuhiko uses Japanese Sign Language (JSL), while Rifat only speaks Kurdish and Turkish — they have to get their grown-up children to interpret for them.

Natsumi (Itsuki Nagasawa), Kazuhiko’s hearing daughter, takes a diplomatic approach to soothe the fraying tempers. By contrast, Hiwa (Yildirm Firat), Rifat’s dishy Japan-raised son, is only too happy to offer faithful translations of his father’s insults (and insists that his counterpart do the same). Unsurprisingly, the youngsters fail to straighten things out, though they quickly strike up a sibling-style camaraderie.