Classic Japanese Movie Review: Shall We Dance? , a beautiful music drama from 1996!
1996 came the all time classic from Japan "Shall We Dance?" That was inspired by the classic dance scene from the 50s movie "Anna and the King" but also gave inspiration to the Richard Ghere movie with the same title.
Story:
Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) is an successful account, married with beautiful Masako Sugiyama (Hideko Hara) and has a beautiful daughter Chikage Sugiyama (played by Ayano Nakamura). Despite a good home and a nice family, Shohei is still unhappy, he has no hobbies, and often prefer to be lonley. One day he see another lonely woman staring outside her window. Who is she? And why do all the people who visit her look happy and dancing? One of them is his boss Tomio Aoki (Naoto Takenaka), who now is full of life even though he slack at his work, he is now more warm hearted and fully spirit dancer. Shohei take a chance to visit this woman. Her name is Mai Kishikawa (Tamiyo Kusakari) and she is a former blackpool dancer and she is now a full time trainer in all kind of dancing art with her assistant Tamako Tamura (Reiko Kusamura). With his new hobby, Shohei is now happy, and full of life, and no longer a lone wolf, but a full time dancer. Tamako and Mai sees strong potential in Shohei and recruit for a dance competition. This makes his wife suspicious, without thinking twice about it she hires a private investigator (Akira Emoto) who happens also to be inspired but dancing.
the US version compared with the Japanese version:
when Shall we Dance movie released in 1996 it was a successful hit all over the world and best selling Japanese movie in history. Ofcourse due to its success Hollywood wanted their version of the movie in 2004 with same title and starring Richard Ghere and Jennifer Lopez. But the US movie is not the same as the Japanese, the Japanese is more serious drama with some comedy relief, and focus of the love for the dancing. The US version is more focus on how many celebrities they could get and the comedy is just silly and the execution of the plot is not well spot on as the Japanese. Also I would like to add the Japanese movies only inspiration was from one scene in the 1950s Anna and The King movie when Anna taught the King to dance, that is amazing that they actually manage to make a great film when they only had one scene to get inspiration from.
Overall:
Shall We Dance? is forever a classic and a timeless movie. Even though it's 1996 and most 90s movies starts now to loose colors but that's what make Shall We Dance? special, it could be old but it could be recent too, it's a movie for the whole family and can bring happiness to people, I urge everybody to watch this movie, it's one of those 1001 movies you have to watch before your time comes.
I reward this great classic 8,7/10.......Shall we dance?
