Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
Shushin-koyou-sei – “to be employed until you die” – is a Japanese expression for what is the life of the “salaryman”. For decades Japanese graduates joined companies and never left. Instead of firing employees who did not make the grade, businesses transferred them to subsidiaries or changed their job description. American radio journalist Gwynne Dyer suggests that the salaryman is the modern-day manifestation of Japan’s feudal Samurai. He contends that Nippon is living a long hangover from its days of the honourable warrior class, with the salaryman being the person who swears complete servitude to the corporate shogun at the expense of family life.
A salaryman’s discovery of independence, absence of shame and self confidence is the main ingredient in Masayuki Suo’s Shall We Dance, a charming yet low-key romantic comedy- drama. Shohei Sugiyama (an impressive and mostly wordless performance by Koji Yakusyo) is a 42-year-old accountant who lives in a comfortable house with a wife and teenage daughter. He works till late and gets up early to take the train into the city – his life has become corporate drudgery.
One night, while riding the train home from work, he sees a beautiful, pensive woman staring out of a dance school window. Day after day he watches for her and eventually musters the courage to enroll for ballroom dancing lessons. But what one first thinks is the story of a man embarking on an amorous affair turns into a film about how to overcome one’s individual – and perhaps a nation’s – soul- sickness.
The alluring beauty, Mai (Tamiyo Kusakari), has been exiled to teach dance by her father after stumbling and losing a ballroom dance competition in Blackpool. Sugiyama is entranced by her and is disappointed to discover that his instructor is to be a plump, friendly, middle-aged woman.
He shyly pursues Mai but when she says to him: “This may sound rude, but I hope you didn’t join the class with me as your goal”, he realises that it is the magic of dance that entrances him. Through dance he manages to get closer to his wife, who, in a poorly developed sub-plot, engages a detective to track Sugiyama with the idea that he is having an affair.
Director Suo said in a recent interview: “For Sugiyama it is important that he found something to thrill him at middle- age. It could’ve been a romance, but through romantic ambition he ends up with dance. From the start I didn’t intend to do a love story. In a way, he falls in love with the romance of dance instead.”
Suo’s previous film, Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t, which played locally at last year’s Japanese Film Festival, was also about the attractions of movement as it traced the fortunes of a motley wrestling team that discovered self- confidence through the sport.
So in Shall We Dance the viewer gets the obligatory training for a contest and the crazy partners – a balding colleague of the hero who wears an outrageous wig and does a ferociously camp tango; a fat, nervous diabetic; and the main guy’s eventual competition partner, a vamp who inevitably ends up losing people to dance with because of her vituperative comments.
But this movie is more than an underdog- makes-good story. Suo manages to instill the high-jinx with some arresting humanity, and what comes out at the end is a subtle and compassionate look at how the two leads – the salaryman and his supposed siren – develop an emotional understanding of each other that goes beyond any Pretty Woman or “let’s get the chick into bed” kind of scenario.
The movie is not flawless. Some sub- plots are under-developed and the supporting characters tend towards sentimental and caricatured portraiture – acting as obvious foils for the jokes (evidently a tradition in Japanese film and theatre) – but the end result is warm and affectionate without overt coyness and campiness.
As the Japanese economy heads for a major dive with the financial calamity about to hit the common man – the white collar worker, this is the absolute right time for a movie like this to appear. It’s uplifting and at times sentimental, but then again it’s no Forrest Gump.
As Suo says, the film has a message about the future of Japan: “It encourages bravery, the confidence to take a new step forward on a new path. Japanese people hate change, they hate the unknown, but they know that life needs to be tried to be understood. If you are asked `Shall we dance?’ then you should put on a smile and get out there and try.”
The film won all 13 of the country’s local “Oscars” – proof that the spirit of Nippon is looking to be refreshed – and it is precisely that essence which will breathe new life into it’s economy and of course the international marketplace for its movies.
As the opening titles say: “Ballroom dancing is regarded with great suspicion in a country where couples don’t go out hand in hand, or say `I love you.'” The little, yet powerful, island seems to be taking the right dance-steps to change all that.