Cinema Tuesdays Review

Slow, Slow, Quick-Step!
By Nathan Cone

This month sees the release on DVD of both the American and Japanese versions of "Shall We Dance?" While the Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez-starring release will undoubtedly sell thousands of copies, and is a pretty faithful remake of the Japanese film from 1996, I sat down recently with the original to take a second look at the inspiration for last year's Hollywood hit.

"Shall We Dance?" is the story of a bored businessman and the dance teacher that changes his outlook on life. The film succeeds through its various characters. Each has their moment to shine; even the dumpy man who takes classes alongside our hero, Mr. Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho), gets a speech where he expresses how dancing makes him feel.

In the American film, it is Jennifer Lopez who draws Richard Gere into the world of ballroom dancing. In the Japanese version, Tamiyo Kusakari plays Mai, the mysterious woman that Mr. Sugiyama sees in an upstairs window of a dance studio from his elevated train car. She is what draws him into the world of dance, but she is not the reason he decides to stay. It's clear that Mr. Sugiyama has found in himself something that was missing, a joie de vivre. Unfortunately, he has not shared this joy with his wife, and she naturally begins to suspect something. It all leads up to a rather obvious climax at a competition, but by that point, we do not care. Like Mr. Sugiyama, we're too swept up in the world of dance and the colorful characters that inhabit it to care about simple plot devices.

The one strange misstep the film makes is in its opening two minutes. An opening prologue explains that ballroom dance is frowned upon in Japan, where couples rarely even hold hands in public. The prologue seems to imply dance is an almost scandalous pastime in Japan. If that's the case, then why are so many people dancing for the rest of the movie, in competition, socially, and otherwise? I did a little Internet research and found the prologue had been changed for American audiences, presumably to make our hero's decision to take dance classes that much more of a bold step, socially.

The DVD of "Shall We Dance?" includes one short featurette that exists only to promote the Hollywood version of the movie, starring Susan Sarandon, Richard Gere, and Jennifer Lopez. No surround sound audio channels are used with this film, but I found the two-channel stereo mix to be more than adequate. "Shall We Dance?" is a simple, sincere film that can easily be qualified as a "feel good movie," and that's not a bad thing. Recommended for nearly all ages (the film is subtitled).

2/10/05

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