Final Rating: 3/5
In 1996, the Japanese film Shall We Dance?, directed by Masayuki Suô, was released in the United States and grossed ten million dollars at the box office, an impressive number for a foreign film. The immense success led to a remake in 2004, directed by Peter Chelmson and Richard Gere in the lead role. Recently, Tokyo Koon Co. restored the film in 4K, and Imagica Entertainment Media Services scanned from the original camera negatives. The 4K restoration features an additional seventeen minutes cut from the initial release.
The film narrates the story of Shohei (Koji Yakusho), a middle-aged man who works in an office and has an ordinary life. Every day, he observes from the subway train a window in the street. It is a ballroom dance class, where a glowing young woman dances in front of the window that he observes daily. He then decides to enroll in the class and learn to dance, but decides not to tell his wife (Hideko Hara) and daughter (Ayano Nakamura). Suddenly, his life has a reason, and he finds something to look forward to every Wednesday night. It leads to Shohei competing in an amateur ballroom competition and confronting his fears of assuming his true passion.
Masayuki Suô develops a romantic comedy that focuses on the subtlety of love. At first, it is more of a story of Shohei finding how to love life again. He is not happy with the comfortable life he has. It is a dull routine that suffocates him. He is unsure where to go subsequently. He has an established career, a healthy marriage, and a growing daughter. Yet, he urges his necessity of engaging in something new and exciting for his discovery. If we have the coming-of-age sub-genre, this is a rediscovery-of-age film. It is him exploring life and performing something that makes his heart beat faster.
In this sense, the crucial element of the film is how the audience cares for this sympathetic forty-year-old man who wants to dance. The foundation of the film is Koji Yakusho, a veteran Japanese actor known for his performances in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure. Yakusho designs a compelling character through his absence of unnecessary words. Shohei is not a man of speech. However, his body language expresses everything we need to know. Shohei shows his excitement through the training of his dancing steps under his office desk or the rehearsal of his routines while reading dancing magazines. The lead performance guides the audience in the development and personal growth of this man.
Consequently, most of the film is set in the ballroom studio. The interactions in the classes are a crucial part of creating the development that the structure requires. Shohei is a poor dancer in the first ballroom classes, a reputable work by Yaksuho; he demonstrates the difficulties of an inexperienced dancer. However, Masayuki Suô does not position the cameras properly in some of the dancing scenes dynamically and cohesively. Sometimes, the camera searches for the steps and loses some of the movements in the meantime. The dance scenes, especially an emotional climax involving Shohei and his wife, suffer from camera movements that do not capture the emotional force of the images in that scene.
Ultimately, Shall We Dance? is a feel-good romantic comedy that is more about the main character finding love again for life. Koji Yakusho portrays a lost middle-aged man with enough charisma to connect the audience to him. In this sense, the additional seventeen minutes just provide more length to the film. Yet, it is an enjoyable and light option to learn more about the career of one of the most vital Japanese actors of the last few decades.
Thank you to Film Movement and Foundry Communications for the screener.
