SHALL WE DANCE?
1/2
WenQing
Written and Directed by : Masayuki Suo
Main Cast : Koji Yakusyo (Syohei Sugiyama), Tamiyo Kusakari (Mai Kishikawa), Naoto Tanakan (Tomio Aoki), Eriko Watanabe (Toyoko Takahashi)
Produced by : Allainira Pictures
Length : 136 minutes
Rating : ** 1/2
Theatres : Shaw Cinemas
Not Quite STRICTLY BALLROOM
It's a wonder how a deceptively simple premise for a story line can lend to so much indulgence. Although SHALL WE DANCE? has garnered 13 Nippon Academy Awards, I just didn't seem to like it very much. Writer and director Masayuki Suo, who gave us the succ essful SUMO DO, SUMO DON'T tries very much to reproduce what I think he wants to be a fun, comic movie, but runs the film further than its subject matter can bear. At a lengthy 136 minutes, SHALL WE DANCE? could have been far more enjoyable at about 90 mi nutes.
The film traces the efforts of ordinary businessman Syohei, who longs for something more inspiring than his workaday world. He wakes up at ungodly hours, cycles with a blank expression to the train station, has to work for the mortgage of his new house t o support his stereotypical one-dimensional wife and his daughter (who later grow a story of their own). The only thing that seems to appeal to him, is the routine longing gaze at a beautiful lady staring out of a window which overlooks one of the train s tops on his route home from work. It seems both are searching for something beyond their ordinary lives (so that's another two people with stories of their own).
Syohei goes to this building one day, and we realise the beautiful lady, Mai, is a dance instructor, and the room she looks out of a ballroom dancing class. Syohei decides to enrol based on the escapism Mai represents, but he is disappointed to find Mai w ill not accept his invitation to dinner. Worse, Mai expresses her disgust (aimed at him) of men who join the class to get close to her. Syohei decides that he will not quit, and takes a genuine interest in dancing. He becomes the partner of Toyoko (who al so has a story of her own, which we later have to endure) for the amateur dancing competition.
When Mai coaches them and sees their joy in dancing, she herself is brought to her senses. Mai rediscovers the joy of dancing and jettisons her emotional baggage about her failures at a prestigious Blackpool (in England, where some footage was shot, and w here all those extra minutes also go) competition. Mai decides to go to England to relearn her love for dancing, to recapture the joy she lost sight of.
I have to say it again, the promise of the film seems hopeful, but Masayuki executes and delivers under par. Too much time is given to every single detail of the competitions, and the training (we normally expect the ROCKY formula of music to snapshots p astiches of various sessions... but Masayuki won't have it), and too much time spent on too many characters flooding the screen with separate stories paralleling the main. In fact so much time is spent at practice that we only get to see an amateur compet ition by the end of the film, and Blackpool remains a blurry fuzz unrealised even though there is no end to talk about it.
We also only find out about Mai's past in a contrived cinematic device : a letter to Syohei (first time director Mel Gibson used this convenient device in MAN WITHOUT A FACE... but it wasn't a full blown recollection, and Masayuki isn't a first-timer any more). The letter thanks him for the joy he took in dancing, wherein she explains everything, yes everything, about her initially cold exterior. It shifts between shots of her musing and silently dancing in the dance classroom, and her competition at Blac kpool. It's a lot of data for a two page letter, and it all comes at the tail end- the last 10 minutes!. Perhaps it is a Japanese style of story-telling, to linger indulgently on tiny details and suddenly have to rush the bigger, juicier bits not tied up earlier?
Perhaps it is also within the Japanese style to have so many characters that few are developed beyond the peripheral, and so hover as indefinites. The clear sign of this is Syohei's wife, who suspects he may be having an affair while he is secretly at dan ce class. Although she hires herself a detective, she adds so little to the main plot that we see her a little in the beginning, find her conspicuously absent when Syohei is training, only for her to turn up unexpectedly at the dance competition- still on e-dimensional. Why does Masayuki put us through watching every single agonising round of the competition? or the details of each visit of the characters to dance halls? Why linger on Mai from beginning to end, when we only find out what she's all about at the end? It makes her so shallow and superficial that even the revelation doesn't endear her to us.
And I have to say this... the comparison to Baz Luhrmann's STRICTLY BALLROOM (1992) is inevitable. But where STRICTLY BALLROOM is deliberately campy, SHALL WE DANCE? topples over its attempts at mooting a similar point about the joy of dance, and all bec ause it can't decide whether to be a comedy or a love story or a docudrama about dance... in trying to be all three, it succeeds in none.
STRICTLY BALLROOM was riveting because of its efficient editing and experimental angles of filming, but I found most appealing the dance sequences to Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time". SHALL WE DANCE? instead borrows stature from THE KING AND I's "Shall W e Dance" song and dance sequence as an inspiration, and in indulging in its own strenuous details, loses sight of it, allowing it to pop up in opportune moments only. In the end, if the message is that dance is a joy, one would be wiser to make it seem so - SHALL WE DANCE? has a scattershot of attractive Blackpool sequences versus its own stars under fluorescent lights in a limited space... dancing isn't really fun after all. Neither is SHALL WE DANCE.
The Flying Inkpot Rating System:
* Wait for the TV2 broadcast.
** A little creaky, but still better than staying at home with Gotcha!
*** Pretty good, bring a friend.
**** Amazing, potent stuff.
***** Perfection. See it twice.
Wen-Qing is convinced that if there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the leprechauns have already grabbed it.
Read other movie reviews at the Inkpot
Other film reviews by this writer can be obtained from the InkVault by doing a key word search with this writer's name.Other film reviews by other writers can also be obtained from the InkVault through key word searches.
Explore the Flying Inkpot
They're Alive!
Concert Reviews
Bit deadish:
Other Resources at The Flying InkpotHome
