Shall We Dance

Writer/director Masayuki Suo's earlier hit, Sumo Do, Sumo Don't (1992), a Japanese Academy Award winner for Best Film, told of a young man forced to serve on a college's woeful, nerd-heavy sumo wrestling team, and how he learns the value of competition and dedication to this seemingly archaic sport. For Shall We Dance?, Suo tells virtually the same surefire tale, though switching the arena from the sumo world to ballroom dancing. Two of his funnier trying-to-be wrestlers -- a Baby Huey-sized one and a little comic one -- come back as struggling dancers. The protagonist this time is a middle-aged businessman, Shohei Sugiyama (Tampopo's Koji Yakusyo), who tries out ballroom dancing for the wrong reason: he has the hots for the instructor, Mai Kishikawa (Tamiyo Kusakari). But she lectures him: "I take dancing very seriously. This is a dancing school, not a disco."

Shall We Dance? is stirring when Shohei's longing to dance shatters the Japanese mold of a lifetime of anguished conformity: a boring desk job, de rigueur drinks after work with people from the office, a late train ride home to the wife and daughter in the suburbs. A voiceover explains that ballroom dancing "is considered shameful in a country where married people never embrace or say `I love you.' " Unfortunately, this is a lesser movie when it focuses on dance competition, becoming a Japanese Strictly Ballroom that never achieves the emotional impact of The King and I when the regent of Siam commands Mrs. Anna, "Shall We Dance?" Opens Friday at the Avon

-- Gerald Peary