Shall We Dance (1996 film)
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| Shall We Dance | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Masayuki Suo |
| Written by | Masayuki Suo |
| Starring | Kôji Yakusho Tamiyo Kusakari |
| Release date(s) | January 27, 1996 |
| Running time | 136 min |
| Language | Japanese |
| IMDb profile | |
Shall We Dance? (Shall We ダンス Shall We Dansu?) is a 1996 Japanese film directed by Masayuki Suo. It was extremely popular in Japan upon its release and won many awards, including the 1996 Japanese Academy Award for Best Picture. It subsequently performed strongly in American art-house theaters when it opened there in 1997, becoming for a time the top-grossing foreign movie in American cinema history. It earned roughly $9.7 million in its US release [1].
The movie is named after the song from Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King and I.
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[edit] Plot
A successful but unhappy accountant begins to secretly take ballroom dance lessons after seeing a beautiful woman staring out from a dance studio. Too embarrassed to tell his wife, his secretive nature leads his wife to think he's having an affair — so she hires a private detective to follow him (and the detective winds up becoming a devoted fan of ballroom dancing). The accountant, who finds himself in beginner's class with a group of misfits — and far from the beautiful woman who keeps herself apart from the lessons, develops his skills as his family life threatens to fall apart, and finds himself entered in an amateur competition, only to find out that his wife, having finally learned the truth, is in the audience.
[edit] Cast
- Koji Yakusho as Shohei Sugiyama
- Tamiyo Kusakari as Mai Kishikawa
- Naoto Takenaka as Tomio Aoki
- Eriko Watanabe as Toyoko Takahashi
- Yu Tokui as Tokichi Hattori
- Hiromasa Taguchi as Masahiro Tanaka
- Reiko Kusamura as Tamako Tamura
- Hideko Hara as Masako Sugiyama
- Hiroshi Miyasaka as Macho
- Kunihiko Ida as Teiji Kaneko
- Amie Toujou as Hisako Honda
- Ayano Nakamura as Chikage Sugiyama
- Katsunari Mineno as Keiri-kachō
- Tomiko Ishii as Haruko Haraguchi
- Maki Kawamura as Eiko Miyoshi
- Takako Matsuzaka as Fusako Fukube
- Kôichi Ueda as Torakichi Kumada
[edit] Original vs. American cut
The American cut of the film differs from the Japanese version in several ways. First, its running time is 118 minutes, compared to the Japanese film's 136 minutes; twenty-six scenes were cut from the film. Second, the voiceover narration at the beginning is different; the Japanese version introduces the history of ballroom dancing in Europe, while the American version explains that ballroom dancing is considered shameful or embarrassing by some Japanese.
The critical and commercial success of the American cut inspired a 2004 Hollywood remake, which proved less successful among critics, but which was a modest commercial success, earning about $58 million in the U.S. [2].
