Shall We Dance?
Writer and director Masayuki Suo
Before he began working on his film, Shall We Dance?, writer and director Masayuki Suo had the same reaction as most Japanese people when he would happen to see a ballroom dancing competition airing on late night television.
"It looked kind of funny to me," says Suo, speaking through an interpreter during a recent visit to Detroit. His opinion changed when he took a closer look. "When I started my research, I saw that Japanese people who were doing ballroom dancing were so open and free," he says, "the expression on their faces was so different from the expression of Japanese people I had known."
In Masayuki Suo's fourth feature film (the first to get a wide release in the United States), he uses a deceptively simple story to get across some of his ideas about social and cultural restrictions in Japan. Shall We Dance? is about a middle-aged accountant — one of the legion of Japanese white collar workers known as "salary-men" — named Sugiyama who discovers his potential for happiness when he studies ballroom dancing.
"Traditionally, we Japanese are notorious for not showing our emotions on our face or expressing our feelings," explains Suo. "That's supposed to be a virtue. But I feel personally that we should be more free: Say whatever you want to say and do whatever you want to do."
Suo aimed this message especially at men who, like himself, are just entering their forties, and whose lives revolve around their work. "The truth is that middle-aged men in Japan, many of them look tired of life," he says.
"It is just work, work, work. And whenever you enjoy something — if you're having fun — people even feel guilty. So I wanted to remove that and tell people to start feeling free to enjoy things without feeling guilty."
A major obstacle to the acceptance of ballroom dancing in Japan has to do with the cultural differences between the physically reserved Japanese and the more touch-oriented customs of western countries.
"There is no social pressure against ballroom dancing itself," explains Suo, "but the pressure is within individual's minds. To take a partner of the opposite sex and dance in a way that brings your bodies close, that people are very shy about. Japan doesn't have the tradition of kissing with a greeting or even shaking hands or hugging."
But the success of Shall We Dance? has triggered a new enthusiasm for ballroom dancing in Japan. What was once considered the domain of a curious sub-culture, and struck many Japanese as a prurient activity, has become more accepted. This has had perhaps the biggest effect on ballroom dancers who — like Suo's character of Tomio "Donny" Aoki — lived one life with their dance partners and teachers and a different one with co-workers, friends, and even family.
"There were many men like this in Japan," Masayuki Suo says, "who were hiding the fact that they were dancing. Those people came out and confessed. And after the movie hit, a lot of people started learning ballroom dancing. So a lot of things changed."
Shall We Dance?, which became a box office hit and swept the Japanese version of the Academy Awards, also found Masayuki Suo his own dance partner. After the film wrapped, Suo married ballerina Tamiyo Kusakari who made her film debut in Shall We Dance? as Mai, the former ballroom champion turned reluctant teacher who was the impetus for Sugiyama to take up dancing.
Between his own films, Suo made several documentaries about director Juzo Itami, following Itami as he made A Taxing Woman (1987) and A Taxing Woman's Return (1988). Writer/director Itami uses his razor sharp wit and keen sense of observation to satirize the idiosyncrasies of modern Japanese culture in comedies like Minbo: The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion (1992) and the marvelous culinary romp, Tampopo (1986).
Shall We Dance? is, in many aspects, Itami lite. Suo, like Itami, skillfully illustrates the dichotomy of post-war Japanese life: the ancient versus the new, western versus eastern influences. But where Itami would be acerbic and make his characters squirm in order to raise the comedic stakes, Suo chooses a more compassionate approach that allows even his most annoying characters a modicum of dignity. Masayuki Suo credits Juzo Itami's influence, especially with a particular piece of advice that may help Shall We Dance? reach a global audience.
"Especially among Japanese, a lot of people feel that we all think the same way," explains Suo. "Let's say that there are ten things to say, then all you have to do is mention a couple of things and then the rest will be understood without explanation. But even in movies, that's not really true."
"Since you don't know how other people will interpret your concept," he explains, "[Itami] emphasized that you have to say ten things if you want to express ten things. He said that whatever movie you make, even an old man in the countryside in France has to understand your message."
© 1996, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.
POSTSCRIPT: Miramax, who distributed Masayuki Suo's film in the United States, did an American remake of Shall We Dance in 2004 with Richard Gere as the timid businessman and Jennifer Lopez as his ballroom dance teacher. Juzo Itami, the filmmaker who influenced Suo and helped bring new Japanese cinema to international attention, died in December 1997 of an apparent suicide.