SHALL WE DANCE |
| CREDITS: Director: Masyuki Suo. Cast: Koji Yakuso, Tamiyo Kusakin, Naoto Takenaka,
Eriko Watonbe & Akira Emoto. Japan (subtitled) 1995. INTRODUCTION: One of the surprise hits of Cannes '97 and the film that finally superseded "Das Boot" as the highest grossing foreign language film in the U.S. It is easy to see why. Warm, charming and witty, who can resist a film that talks in such hushed reverential tones about that heaven-on-earth that is Blackpool, yes that Blackpool. SYNOPSIS: One night on the long commute home from his mind-numbing office job Saguyama (Yakuso) looks up and spies the delectable if somewhat forlorn form of Mai (Kusakin) starring out of an upper story window. On impulse he goes to investigate and finds himself enrolling in a Ballroom dancing school at which she teaches. This apparently chance encounter changes both their lives forever. REVIEW: A truly beautiful movie, moving, witty and enriching, it is easy to see why the movie has been such a hit in the U.S. a country which now seems unable to produce movies of this calibre. Yakuso and Kusakin are excellent as the star-crossed lovers, strictly Platonic you understand - this is still a Japanese film about a married man. The ensemble cast of supporting players are superb and is rounded of with a large supporting cast of residents of the borough of Blackpool, Blackpool Borough Council must be creaming themselves over the free publicity meted out to the city here and one can only hope that this film will allow Blackpool to supersede Scunthorpe as the second most famous English city in Japanese polls Comparisons with "Strictly Ballroom" are perhaps inevitable. After all, how many comedies about the world of ballroom dancing are there? But such comparisons would be entirely unfair due to the differing backgrounds of the cultures from which the two films emerged. The brash Australian film takes pot shots at the kitsch out-datedness of the ballroom scene, while the gentle Japanese film sees Ballroom dancing as something near revolutionary. Japanese culture's prizing of the inscrutability of emotions and the disdain of physical contact puts Ballroom dancers on a par with pornographers, as anything involving physical contact between members of the opposite sex is viewed as sexual in nature. "Strictly Ballroom" has in fact more in common with ***'s last film "Sumo Do, Sumo Don't" which showed a group of dispossessed Japanese youth come to accept the kitsch out-of-date Sumo scene as a potential escape from their day-to-day existence, (much the same position ballroom dance had in Luhrman's masterpiece). Sugiyama's escape from office drudgery via dance in this film seems to be indicative of an emerging theme in Japanese film and culture. Following the economic collapse and the austerity measures initiated to combat it the Japanese have finally, it would appear, been shaken out of decades of bourgeois complacency, with the trade unionist friendly Democratic Party and the Japanese Communist Party now respectively the second and third strongest parties in the Japanese parliament. Suo's film is just the first in what I predict will be a long line of films that show the emergence of the Japanese proletariat as a conscious unit, and the end of the crypto-feudalism that has dogged them. Forget the politics and go to see this film to remind yourself why you fell in love with cinema in the first place. Mutt's Rating: **** |