Guy's Books and Thoughts

I watched the DVD version of SHALL WE DANCE? again.
I was not really planning to watch the whole movie.
But I pretty much watched the whole movie all over
again. I guess it had a way of drawing the viewer in.

The film is about a man who takes up ballroom dancing, which
was an activity frowned upon in Japan at the time (1995).
According to the narrator, public show of affection between
man and wife was simply not allowed. And ballroom dancing with
someone not one's spouse, was even more severely looked down
upon. In a way the movie starts out with a midlife crisis
Dudley Moore type chasing a beautiful woman and switches
direction to a focus on ballroom dancing. The ballroom dance
instructor quickly turns down the middle age man's request to
dinner, saying that this is not a disco. The man switches his
focus from the woman to ballroom dancing. He did not drop
out because he did not want to be seen as simply joining the
class out of interest in the woman. My guess is that he did not
want to "lose face." I could be wrong, but I suspect this
would be more a Japanese mentality than American. I suspect
most Americans would drop out immediately after that rejection.

The film is also in part about the dance instructor. The film sort of deals with her coming back to dancing. She was disappointed or disillusioned that her partner "failed" to protect her. Maybe her father was wise in not letting her take up a new
dance partner. She would have probably blamed him for the couples
failure. I guess her obsession with her old partner's failure to "protect" her sort of makes me think of a fighter pilot, whose wingman fails to watch his back, sort of like the movie TOP GUN. Well in TOP GUN, Tom Cruise has to learn to watch his wingman and not go off on his own. Perhaps one may say the story also is about the instructor learning teamwork, trust and taking responsibility.
I think there is also a theme, maybe a cliche of a disillusioned
teacher coming back to life because of his/ her student.

I think the director has also pulled a few gags or physical puns in
the movie. If you will note when the man makes his first visit to
the dance studio, he turns around to leave and runs into that
middle age lady trying to enter the dance studio. The two do
several side steps trying to get around each other. Sort of
a "dance." When the wife visits the private investigator the sort
of do a side step to get around each other, another "dance."

I thought the scene where the man is teaching his wife to dance.
At first it is clumsy and look more like two judo contestants, but
they progress and move to dance. Notice how the husband and wife change
hand position. Notice the way they end up holding each other. A definite change from the beginning dance moves.

Maybe I've read too much into the film. But I think there
are some little things which the director put in the film
to enrich the
film.

Guy