Film reveals nuances of Japan’s dance culture

SHALL WE DANCE, written and directed by Masayuki Suo, running time: 118 minutes, rated PG (for mild language). Playing nightly at 5, 7:15 and 9:30 p.m. and Sat.-Sun. matinees at 12:30 and 2:45 p.m. July 28 through Aug. 7 at the Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville. In Japanese with English subtitles.

In Japan, a country where couples never touch or show affection in public, there is a secret, growing passion drumming quietly to life.

Borrowed from Western culture, this pastime is a guilty pleasure where people press hips against hips, interlock fingers with fingers, and move swiftly along a wave of excitement they’ve never known before. This isn’t the Kama Sutra that’s titillating the Japanese. It’s ballroom dancing, and you can see some very inspired examples of it in Masayuki Suo’s excellent “Shall We Dance?”

Already being compared to Baz Luhrmann’s Australian film “Strictly Ballroom,” “Shall We Dance?” is better and focuses on Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusyo), a handsome, married, 40-ish salaryman who works long hours at an office and is unhappy with his mundane life. One evening, as he is riding the train home from work, he glimpses a beautiful, melancholy woman standing at a dance studio window, and hope lights his face — is she what his life has been missing?

Shohei leaves the train to find out but is at first too embarrassed to enter the studio. In Japanese culture, taking dance lessons is nearly as shocking as having an affair, and the audience senses that Shohei’s reputation is on the line when he finally takes the risk and steps inside the studio, where the striking Mai (Tamiyo Kusakari) works as a personal dance instructor. Unfortunately for Shohei, he cannot afford Mai, who charges about $50 for her time, and is forced to take group lessons from an older, less attractive woman … who eventually teaches him, and the two other men in the group, to love dancing.

The film, which swept the Japanese Academy Awards in 1996, and was the sleeper hit of 1997’s Sundance Film Festival, is complicated by Shohei’s wife, who knows nothing of her husband’s dancing, and who gradually begins to notice changes in him. He’s no longer unhappy, but brighter than ever … and coming home late every Wednesday night. Is Shohei having an affair? His wife hires a private investigator to find out and the film moves towards its inevitable climax, not to be revealed here.

The flim’s pleasure comes from watching Shohei and his sidekicks shed their spiritual inhibitions on the dance floor. They rumba, they waltz, they tear off dresses in awful missteps. Shohei’s office associate, Aoki (Naoto Takenaka), steals the show as the hip-swiveling, pelvis-thrusting, lip-twisting, maniacal dynamo whom I’m betting is the love child of Charro and Michael Jackson.

It has been a long time since I’ve seen a film that had the audience howling the way this one did. See this film during its extended run at the Railroad Square.

Grade: A-

VIDEO OF THE WEEK

A MONTH BY THE LAKE, directed by John Irvin, written by Trevor Bentham, running time: 91 minutes, rated: PG (for mild sensuality).

In her best films, Vanessa Redgrave’s performances have never been less than effortless, intelligent, luminous, crackling and wise. She might be our best living actress. Superb as the dying Mrs. Wilcox in “Howards’s End,” cynical and unforgiving as Peggy Ramsay in “Pick Up Your Ears,” she was the only reason to watch the impossible “Mission Impossible,” which was only good while she was on screen. What Redgrave brings to her performaces that so few of today’s actresses have been able to duplicate is more than a dry sense of humor, but an emotional, intellectual and physical strength that is rarely overt, and more often quietly implied. She is like a mature swan, regal and powerful in every part she plays.

In John Irvin’s charming, romantic comedy “A Month by the Lake,” Redgrave is so good, so effervescent and bubbling with life and mischief, you will find yourself wishing this particular month lasted a year.

The film is set in the spring of 1937 on the shores of Italy’s Lake Como. There, in an elegant hotel that overlooks the lake, the spirited, wide-smiling and British Miss Bentley (Redgrave) meets the stoic Major Wilshaw (Edward Fox), a Brit himself, who intrigues her because of his ears: They suggest to her “a kind and gentle man.” She pursues him, but is crushed when he suddenly announces he must return to England.

Enter the sexy and towering Miss Beaumont (Uma Thurman), a naughty nanny to two unruly children, who wends her way like a slick serpent toward the major as he is leaving for home. After kissing him on the cheek, she whispers in his ear that she wishes they had gotton to know one another better. Dazed and smitten by her beauty, the major falls for the young woman, who really doesn’t care for him at all. Miss Beaumont (whose name, translated, means “beautiful mountain”) is a woman aware of her power over men, and plays with the major for her own evil fun. Of course the major returns to the hotel to strike up a relationship with Miss Beaumont, but what he finds is something all together unexpected, as Miss Bentley rises to her full power and pushes this “beautiful mountain” rather hilariously and ingeniously out of the way.

Grade: A-

Christopher Smith, a writer and critic who lives in Brewer, reviews movies each Monday in the NEWS.