The dumb irony of foreign-film acquisition is that distributors scour the globe looking for the least foreign foreign films they can possibly find, a practice which guarantees results that are conventional at best or, as with the recent That's The Way I Like It, depressingly pale reflections of American culture. While Koki Mitani's Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald doesn't exactly break from this tradition—the title alone is a reference to the fast-food chain—it's a genuine novelty, a rare and disarming Japanese screwball farce. Set almost entirely within a radio studio, which lends it admirable economy, the film plays out a dramatist's nightmare at lightning speed, as a novice writer (Kyoka Suzuki) watches her work get mangled beyond recognition. After an uneventful rehearsal, her teary melodrama seems ready to air, but when the lead actress (Keiko Toda) insists on changing her role from a fisherman's wife in a Japanese village to a trial lawyer in New York City, everything begins to unravel. Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald cascades into ever more ridiculous impromptu changes, as characters take on different nationalities and the story moves into outer space, getting progressively funnier as it goes along. Mitani's populist instincts sometimes get the better of him, most notably in unnecessary cutaways to a burly trucker tuning into the show and an endless denouement that all but invents new subplots to tidy up. But for the most part, his classical sense of comic timing and rhythm gives shape to the manic backstage lunacy, and his unabashed nostalgia for the imaginative art of live radio couldn't be more infectious.