Quiet, elegant and brimming with unaffected charm, the Japanese film Shall We Dance? would be a dreamy movie any time of year, but it is especially so in blockbusterized summer, when the cineplexes are rocking and rolling with dinosaurs, aliens, Batmen, and bombastic testosto-fests. Here is a small but beautiful meditation on the sweet pain of yearning, the nature of innocence, and the uses of art in renewing one’s zeal for life.
In many ways it resembles the Italian film of two years ago, II Postino, which became a surprise hit, sleepwalking out of the art houses and into the mainstream. Shall We Dance? should enjoy a similar fate.
Writer-director Masayuki Suo’s film is obviously about dancing—in this case, of the ballroom sort, which we are told up front, is a daring, slightly risqué pastime in rigid, reserved Japan. Shall We Dance? is a fable about a dutiful salary-man deep in midlife crisis. Sugiyama (Koji Yakusyo) has a respectable office job, a wife, a child, a decent house—all the rewards of modest middle-class success. Though he doesn’t complain, Sugiyama is being smothered by despair.
One day, making the dreary subway commute home from work, he spots a gorgeous woman standing in the window of a dance school, looking forlorn. Sugiyama can’t quit thinking about her, for she symbolizes his deep desire to escape his passionless life. When his wife, concerned for her husband’s strange depression, suggests he spend some time after work with his colleagues one night a week, Sugiyama takes what is for him a wild leap into the unknown, and signs up for dance lessons.
It’s the tall, dark, and very shy businessman’s way of meeting this regal swan, whom he hopes to romance. But the young teacher, Mai (Tamiyo Kusakari), remains aloof. Sugiyama’s herky-jerky attempts at learning ballroom steps don’t amount to much, because he’s only using dance as a romantic networking tool, so to speak. One night, Sugiyama works up the courage to ask the ice princess Mai out to dinner.
If this were an American film, the two would have fallen in love at this point, with Sugiyama leaving his wife and child to take up with the trophy-wife dancer, who renews his passion for life by teaching him to dance.
Happily, this does not happen, which is quite astonishing to one accustomed to the immoral romanticism of Hollywood movies, in which the quest for individual happiness takes sovereignty over moral demands, even to wife and child. Mai sternly admonishes Sugiyama, telling the stricken fellow that she will be indeed angry if he only took up dance as a romantic ploy. And off she goes.
Desperate to save face, Sugiyama continues coming to the class, pretending to have been an ardent lover of dance all along. With the possibility of an affair with Mai out, a strange thing happens: He begins to love, really adore, dancing. His longing for her now sublimated, Sugiyama discovers that dancing for its own sake brings him real joy. But there is the matter of his clueless wife at home, who spends her nights cruelly alone, fearful that her husband is having an affair. There will be a reckoning here.
Later, we hear a surprising confession from the lonely Mai, a professional dancer whose accomplished technique has declined into chilly formalism, the pursuit of perfection not for love of the art, but for worldly success.
You don’t have to be a Tokyo strap-hanger to identify with Sugiyama, played with great dignity by Shohei Yakusho, who so tenderly elicits our sympathy. Sugiyama’s is a common human condition, particularly of middle age, when so many lose their sense of wonder and purpose. At the root of this film’s appeal, I think, is its great affection for innocence, and the hope it offers those who feel trapped in stultifying routines. The characters are happiest when they are dancing and forgetting themselves. When Sugiyama and the others glide, cheek to cheek, with such elan across the dance floor, they are no longer shamed, anxious, mediocre mortals, but Fred and Ginger. And this irresistible encounter with grace not only makes humdrum days bearable through a harmless form of escapism, but also promises to transform their lives of routinized respectability into something more effervescently alive. Shall We Dance? By all means.