Shall We Dance?

"Lounge lizards and showgirls. . . ."

"What's wrong with that?"

(Conversation between Mai and Kimoto-san.)

What do you get when you cross Strictly Ballroom with an old-fashioned American romantic comedy? A Japanese classic! (Which has already won 13 Japanese academy awards and grossed $30,000,000 . . . in Japan alone!) If ever a foreign-language film deserved consideration for the "Best Picture of the Year" Oscar, it's this one. We have seen this one three times, and have observed a grand total of one person leaving the theater without a smile (but she looked rather crotchety anyway).

Shall We Dance? from writer/director Masayuki Suo is a triumph. This is a movie that Hollywood should be ashamed that it didn't make. It is essentially an exploration of the adventures (such as they are) of middle-aged Japanese "salary-man" Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho, from Kurusawa's Ran and Juzo Itami's Tampopo), who suddenly decides to step out of the middle-class rat race in which he is trapped. Mr. Sugiyama is riding the train home from a night "on the town" with co-workers (he leaves them at 9:00, which gives you an idea of the sort of man he is), when he looks up and sees the beautiful Mai Kishikawa (director Suo's real-life wife, Tamiyo Kusakari) gazing out the window of a dance studio near a station where his train stops every night.

Mr. Sugiyama, happily married to a loyal and loving wife (Hideko Hara), with a bright daughter (Misa Shimizu), a car, and a nice suburban house with a garden, becomes obsessed with the woman and decides that he must take up ballroom dancing. This doesn't seem like much to an American audience, but in a society in which husbands and wives do not even kiss in public, the idea of a married man dancing in public with another woman is utterly scandalous. Despite this, a very sheepish and awkward Mr. Sugiyama takes up ballroom dancing at the Kishikawa Studio, only to discover that his instructor is not the beautiful Mai, but a much older woman (Eriko Watanabe), much to his dismay.

The unfortunate Mr. Sugiyama doesn't even get private lessons. He is enrolled in a beginning dance class with two other men, the ingratiating Mr. Hattori, played to the hilt by Yu Tokui, and Mr. Tanaka, played by Hiromasa Taguchi, who has taken up dancing as "exercise." Worse, the clumsy newcomers are constantly put to shame by the wild dancing of a client who wants to emulate world Latin dance champion, Donny Burns, and by his haughty sometime-partner, hard-driving dance instructor Tamako Tamura (Reiko Kusamura).

In spite of marital stress caused by his weekly dancing (on Wednesday nights his shirts come home smelling of one woman's perfume, on weekends they smell of several different perfumes), in spite of bizarre encounters at the office with his creepy co-worker Mr. Aoki (Naoto Takenaka, doing some brilliant acting), and in spite of being tailed by private detective Toru Miwa (a constantly-amusing Akira Emoto), Mr. Sugiyama persists in dancing at the school and at clubs, where he first begins to learn of "the fiercely competitive world of ballroom dancing," to coin a phrase. He discovers that Mai is not simply a dance instructor and the daughter of the school's owner, she was once a semi-finalist at the world ballroom dancing championships in Blackpool, England, and that he now has a rival for Mai -- Japanese dance champion Hiromasa Kimoto (Masahiro Motoki), who "can make your backbone melt," and who wants Mai to be his dance partner. (Kusakari is herself a ballerina in real life, by the way, so her dancing is superbly formal.) He also learns of the sheer joy of dancing from his own instructor, who tells him how her life was transformed by having seen and heard the title number, "Shall We Dance," in The King and I.

Unfortuantely for Sugiyama, Miwa (and Mrs. Sugiyama) catch up with him just as he is about to do what, in an American film, would be the climax and finale -- he is finally coaxed into entering a dancing competition. But, despite the very American look and feel given to the film by Suo and cinematographer Naoki Kayano, this is after all, a modern Japanese movie, and a pat ending with Sugiyama winning and then falling into the arms of his forgiving and loving wife would be just too simplistic. Fortunately for us!

His marriage suddenly shaken by the revelation of his dancing, Mr. Sugiyama resolutely abandons dancing and throws himself into his work and returns to the grinding drudgery of his routine life. Despite the efforts of his co-worker Mr. Aoki, fellow-student Mr. Hattori, instructor Tamako (and eventually, even his own wife) to get him to dance again, Sugiyama becomes "a couch potato." This continues until he learns of a party being held for Mai. Will he attend or won't he? This is the question whose resolution Suo has left for the film's climax. Will he maintain his determination to stay away from the beautiful Mai or will he go to her?

Although the film is in Japanese, the Japanese language has the trait of aborbing foreign words and phrases whole if they apply to something which is not traditionally Japanese (such as ballroom dancing). Because "it's an English sport, after all," ballroom dancing entered Japan with its own vocabulary, so not only will American audiences be able to follow the film, many will note that occasionally the subtitles don't accurately reflect the "Japanese" being spoken, because so much of the "Japanese" is actually English. People who hate subtitles should not only not fear Shall We Dance, they may be better able to appreciate the many subtle and wonderfully beautiful images with which Suo and Kayano have sprinkled the film. (Watch, for example, the reactions of the waitress when Mr. Hattori describes how people perceive of ballroom dancers as "perverts.") Indeed, audience members who leave when the (mostly Japanese) end credits begin to roll will miss some of the most beautiful scenes in the film (as well as some very amusing English-language credits).

One hopes that the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will see this and realize that for every Lost World or Batman and Robin or other mega-buck special fx flick which substitutes computer animation and explosions for storyline and actors, a dozen or more great films like this could be made every year. . . but aren't. Go see Shall We Dance?, and, if you are in AMPAS, think about sending a message to Hollywood moguls that an animatronic lizard or an exploding building with two stuntmen on a springboard and an audience-deafening "BANG" is NOT a substitute for a compelling story, good directing and the hiring of real actors (as opposed to computer graphics technicians).

Shall We Dance? represents real movie-making at its very, very best.

(Note to Grammy voters: the closing theme of this film is way excellent -- it's got a good beat and you can dance to it!)