Shall We Dance?

IT MAY be that the profoundest works of stage and screen perceive comedy and drama as not just jostling each other, but actually interpenetrating until they become almost indistinguishable. Such plays are The Misanthrope, Uncle Vanya, The Glass Menagerie; such films are The Children of Paradise, I Vitelloni, Tokyo Story, and now Masayuki Suo's superb Shall We Dance?, one of the great films of all time.

Unfortunately, it is extremely hard to write about. First, because so much of it is conveyed through a glancing remark, a mere suggestion, even a silence. Second, because there are so few grand incidents that one hesitates to give away any of them. The very silences are twofold: those in which an important thing hovers shyly, tremulously just this side of speech; and powerful, abrupt lacunae the viewer has to fill in with his imagination. This is a movie so understated that much of it is told by the eyes and feet of its characters.

Shohei Sugiyama is 42 and a company man, one of those mid-level employees of a large Japanese concern whose lives are as assured as they are predictable and unexciting. He has a sympathetic wife and a clever teenage daughter, a car, and a house he has just bought in the suburbs, and he will dutifully go on until he drops. There ought to be more to life than that. Then, returning one evening from work on the commuter train, he notices during one of the stops a lovely, melancholy young woman gazing out the window of a dance school. From now on he watches for her each time his train stops there. Sometimes he sees her giving dance lessons, sometimes staring -- absorbed, abstracted -- through that window.

Social dancing, as a charming prologue informs us, is not truly accepted in Japan, where married couples seldom go out together, and never display any mutual feelings. Still less does one go out with a member of the opposite sex not one's spouse. Thus ballroom dancing, with the close physical contact between partners, is widely frowned upon, except in dance halls, which, however, are by definition infra dig.

Well, Sugiyama gets off the train for a better view of the woman at the window, whose enormous eyes seem to contain worlds of yearning. Looking carefully left and right to make sure no one is watching, he ventures up the stairs to the school's door, but it takes a funny accident to get him over the threshold. As tongue-tied as an unprepared schoolboy, he all but lets the lovely lady enroll him for private lessons which he cannot afford, when a middle-aged woman teacher comes over to announce that the beginners' group is one short; this Sugiyama can pay for, and he enthusiastically signs up.

At home, his understanding wife has urged him to get out of his depression by staying out later with his office mates. So the clandestine Wednesday- evening dance classes arouse no suspicion. And a new world of dance and dream opens up for the accountant. The three other men in his group are not all strictly beginners. A tiny bespectacled fellow, in it to catch up with his wife, has some previous experience and tries to lord it over the others. A bizarre long-haired chap, wildly show-offy on the dance floor, fancies himself a rival to Donny Burns, the champion Latin dancer. A homely, fat young man was told by his doctor that dancing would be good for his diabetes.

Their teacher, disappointingly to Sugiyama, is to be middle-aged Miss Tamura, who, though kindly and shrewd, is no match for Mai Kishikawa, the owner's beautiful daughter, for whom many men have joined up. Right now, Sugiyama must watch Mai give private lessons to a rich, elderly lecher, whose pawings she deftly parries. But Sugiyama gallantly stumbles ahead through the two propaedeutic party dances and on to the ten ballroom dances, and keeps up with his group, more elegant than the others. Masayuki Suo makes the lessons, the steps and missteps and the surrounding incidents, funny, touching, and deeply involving.

Meanwhile Sugiyama's office existence is sketched in concisely but tellingly, as is his home life, where his wife smells on his shirts first one scent, then, after he attends dance parties, a more bedeviling mixture of scents. With considerable difficulty, she brings herself to consult a private eye, who proves a fascinating character. The director manages to make all subplots come racily alive. But most enchanting are the dance school, dance parties, dance halls, and, finally, dance competition, and a climactic finale, as well as, in flashbacks, Blackpool, England, where the ballroom world championships take place.

There is the tremendously affecting story of what happens, or doesn't happen, between Sugiyama and Mai, and also Sugiyama and his wife. But there are other juicy characters, notably plain, chubby, middle-aged, and cantankerous Toyoko, a good advanced student who becomes Sugiyama's cranky partner in the Eastern Japan Amateur Competition. There are the stories of Sugiyama's fellow group members, one more endearing than the next. There are the two detectives who, at first merely trailing Sugiyama, become genuinely involved in the dance. And much more that you must explore for yourself.

The dance is supreme, a metaphor for life itself with its ideals and pitfalls, its hopes and setbacks, its exhilarating mini-triumphs and confoundingly bitter jokes. Mai is Terpsichore, the spirit of the dance. When she hops, glides, floats along in a quickstep, guiding Sugiyama and Toyoko in a miraculous threesome across a seemingly dissolving floor, we watch transfixed and transported; it is as liberating an experience as art can bestow. The bittersweet peripetias in the course of which Mai and Sugiyama, who cannot become lovers but give something infinitely precious to each other, are so beautiful that even thinking about them brings tears to my eyes. The closest comparison is to Brief Encounter, but this is deeper and lovelier.

Every part, down to the merest walk-ons, is impeccably acted, and the leads are magnificent. Koji Yakusho, as Sugiyama, is the decent, average man rising to heights of generosity. His progression from dancing merely for Mai to discovering the joy of dance for its own sake is conveyed with ineffable tact, indeed nobility, and a magicianly blend of comedy and pathos. Hideko Hara is poignant as the wife, and as "Donny" Aoki, Naoto Takenaka is sublime in his funny-sad clowning. As Mai, Tamiyo Kusakari, a leading ballerina whose first dramatic role this is, is an archetypal bijin, or Japanese beauty, who embodies equally the ethereal and the sexy in dance, and proves, beyond that, an actress of shattering power.

Behind all this is the genius of the writer-director, Masayuki Suo. With what self-effacing but unfailing artistry he knows when to cut a scene off short on a key line, or when to stretch a scene out, pleasurably or achingly. He knows the interplay of brightly lit and dark sequences, the canny alternation of staccato and legato -- in sum, what really counts, the music of filmmaking: rhythm, counterpoint, polyphony, and the interweaving of contrasted themes to maximum effect. Further, he sees the goodness in all his characters, even the most risible ones, and approaches them all with deference and affection.

From Yoshikazu Suo, he gets the letter-perfect music score in absolutely apposite arrangements. And in Naoki Kayano, he has the cinematographer whose color sense subtly matches the words and music. There is, near film's end, as Mai speaks her letter to Sugiyama in voiceover, a brief shot of her in front of a seascape. It comprises cool slate blues and off-whites such as have never figured in the film's palette, but here complete a necessary color scheme. That is artistry. I can hardly wait to see Shall We Dance? for the third time.