Year: 1996
Country:
Japan
Run Time:
117 minutes
A surprise delight of the 17th CIFF (1993) was Masayuki Suo?s ?Sumo Do, Sumo Don?t?, a farce about the delicate art of sumo wrestling. Now he?s back, with a not-dissimilar subject (at least for some practitioners): ballroom dancing. Tired Salaryman Sugiyama is on the evening tram bound for his heavily mortgaged suburban home when he looks up and loses his heart. There in the window of the Kishikawa school of dancing is a lovely young lady, gazing out shyly. Sugiyama enrolls in the beginner?s class, stumbles to master the quick step and the quarter-turn, and joins a secret society of Japanese who lead double lives, concealing their terpsichorean habit from disapproving relatives and scornful co-workers to unwind by night on the dance floor. The girl he glimpsed is a champion dancer who broke up with her partner, and the Eastern Amateur Ballroom competition is coming up? Meanwhile, Mrs. Sugiyama grows uneasy about her husbands later-than-usual hours ? and the fresh spring in his step. Crowd-pleasing and unabashedly sweet-spirited, SHALL WE DANCE? is a sincere invitation to all. (In Japanese with English Subtitles)
Screenplay
Masayuki Suo
Director
Masayuki Suo
Producer
Hiroyuki Kato, Seiji Urushido, Shigeru Ohno, Kazuhiro Igarashi, Tetsuya Ikeda, Shoji Masui, Yuji Ogata
Cinematography
Naoki Kayano
Editing
Jun?ichi Kikuchi
Principal Cast
Koji Yakusyo, Tamiyo Kusakari, Naoto Takenaka, Eriko Watanabe
Swank Motion Pictures
201 South Jefferson Ave.
St. Louis, MO 63103
Tel: (800) 876 5577
Fax: (314) 289 2192
www.swank.com
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