Shall We Dance? (1996 film)
| Shall We Dance? | |
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Publicity poster
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| Directed by | Masayuki Suo |
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| Screenplay by | Masayuki Suo |
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| Music by | Yoshikazu Suo |
| Cinematography | Naoki Kayano |
| Edited by | Junichi Kikuchi |
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Production
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| Distributed by | Toho |
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Release date
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Running time
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136 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
Shall We Dance? (Shall we ダンス? Sharu wi Dansu??) is a 1996 Japanese film. Its title refers to the song, "Shall We Dance?" which comes from Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I. It was directed by Masayuki Suo.
The film begins with a close-up of the inscription above the stage in the ballroom of the Blackpool Tower: "Bid me discourse, I will enchant thine ear", from the poem Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare. As the camera pans around the ballroom giving a view of the dancers, a voice-over explains that in Japan, ballroom dancing is treated with suspicion.
Shohei Sugiyama (Kōji Yakusho) is a successful salaryman, with a house in the suburbs, a devoted wife, Masako (Hideko Hara), and a teenage daughter, Chikage (Ayano Nakamura). He works as an accountant for a firm in Tokyo. Despite these external signs of success, however, Sugiyama begins to feel as if his life has lost direction and meaning and falls into depression.
One night, while coming home on the Tokyo Subway, he spots a beautiful woman with a melancholy expression looking out from a window in a dance studio. This is Mai Kishikawa (Tamiyo Kusakari), a well-known figure on the Western ballroom dance circuit. Sugiyama becomes infatuated with her and decides to take lessons in order to get to know her better.
Sugiyama's life changes once his classes begin. Rather than Mai, his teacher is Tamako Tamura (Reiko Kusamura), who becomes an important mentor to him. He meets his classmates: Tōkichi Hattori (Yu Tokui) who joined to impress his wife, and Masahiro Tanaka (Hiromasa Taguchi) who joined to lose weight. He also meets Toyoko Takahashi (Eriko Watanabe), another student. He further discovers that one of his colleagues from work Tomio Aoki (Naoto Takenaka) is a regular at the dance studio. Aoki, who is balding and mocked at work for his rigid ways, is revealed to be leading a secret life as a long-haired (via a wig) ballroom dancer. Though distant from her, the classes increase his infatuation for Mai. His secret thus becomes twofold: not only must he hide the lessons from his wife, he must also hide them from his friends and colleagues as it is considered embarrassing according to traditional Japanese customs to participate in Western ballroom dance.
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