Shall We Dance?

Learning to dance transcends the mere mechanics of physical activity in two recent films. Dancing becomes a metaphor for love: the yearning, passion, anguish, and fulfillment. In addition, how one dances, where one dances, and with whom say much about a culture and its ideas about love in both these films.

Released in the U.S. in spring 1997, Masayuki Suo's Shall We Dance? (Miramax Films) is a romantic comedy that tells the poignant story of a Japanese businessman Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) who studies ballroom dance in secret. His culture disdains physical contact displayed by married couples in public and ballroom dancing in general. Like the hero of a nineteenth-century Romantic ballet yearning for the unattainable, enraptured by ballroom dance teacher Mai (Japanese ballerina Tamiyo Kusakari). But he soon becomes infatuated with dancing itself, and, in the process, renews both his relationship with his wife, Masako (Hideko Hara), and Mai's love of dance. Unlike James in La Sylphide, who destroyed the creature he loved, Sugiyama enables Mai to renew her career while he returns happily to his wife.

With the exception of flashbacks that recount Mai's damaged career as a championship ballroom dancer, Shall We Dance? follows chronologically the dramatic progression of Sugiyama's obsession. Writer-director Suo first establishes the conformity of Sugiyama's regimented life, then the trepidation with which he finally enrolls in a class and clumsily begins his study. Increasingly involved with dancing, he is seen surreptitiously drawing floor plans while seated at is office desk and practicing step patterns on the subway platform or in his darkened living room late at night. In one euphoric scene he leaps from his bicycle en route home from the train and waltzes solo in the pouring rain.

When Sugiyama tries to engage Mai romantically, she chastises him for using dance to reach her. He then realizes the seriousness of dancing. Coaching him for a competition and insisting that "dance is more than the steps," she experiences a generosity that had not previously informed her professional work. "I was dancing with myself and not my partner," she explains. The courtesy with which a dancer responds when his or her partner makes a serious error in competition becomes a measure of that dancer's character and artistry. So it is in life. By the end of the film, Sugiyama's wife and daughter have, through a private detective service, discovered his secret activity. Mutual confessions lead to greater understanding and conclude with Masako asking Sugiyama to teach her to dance. In their tiny backyard, to the delight of their daughter, he does.

In Shall We Dance? Suo discovers in all stages of dancing the complexities of the human condition of love and captures them with warmth and humor.