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| Shall we Dance? | | Date Created: Jan 23, 2005, 03:01 AM |
 Shall We Dance? (Director Peter Chelsom 2004)
I am always apprehensive when Hollywood tries to put its spin on a successful foreign movie. The past is littered with feeble attempts to translate foreign movies into something more palatable to the average American audience. This usually involves dumbing down the movie so that it would be intelligible to the average 3rd grader. In some cases, this means completely stripping out unsavoury parts. For example, the Poesque ending in the Dutch classic "The Vanishing" was jettisoned in favour of a saccharine conclusion that would go down well with the Disney crowd. "Shall We Dance" belongs to the category of Hollywood remakes where the producers have chosen to be superficially faithful to the original while replacing the emotional core of the story with a star-studded cast designed to bring in the audiences.
"Shall We Dance" is based on a Japanese hit movie of the same name (in some countries it was released as "Shall We Dansu"). A Japanese salariman has achieved all he wants in corporate and family life, but he still finds an aching emptiness in his life. Travelling home one day in the over-crowded urban train, he looks up and sees a sad, beautiful woman looking out of the window of a dance studio. Smitten by this beautiful portrait that he imagines is sharing the same melancholic outlook to life, he eventually plucks up the courage to do something out of the norm and takes up dance lessons. Slowly, he rediscovers the passion for life through dance.
What distinguished the original from the average feel-good movie was its tender look at how ballroom dancing allowed the two main characters to rediscover the passions in their lives. For the accountant, it is about being truly exceptional, instead of merely very competent, in something and in re-injecting the passion in his family life. For the dance instructress, it is about learning to love ballroom dancing again. This in and of itself is a timeless tale, but the movie cleverly sets it against the emptiness of Japanese society. Coming as it did five years after Japan slipped into a deflationary recession that sparked off years of national soul-searching, it was truly a film for its time.
All this is absent in the Hollywood version. Instead of the average Joe distinguished only by his normalness, we get John Clark, a lawyer that prepares wills, played by the ageless Richard Gere. Now with Richard Gere?s looks and suits that came from the latest Bond movie, one has to wonder why Clark should have any problems getting what he wants in life. Moreover, he goes home every day to beautiful suburban house with a wife (Susan Sarandon) that still loves him, and two very well-adjusted kids. As far as I can see, he is already in paradise and the movie just does not convince anyone that John leads a pathetic existence for which he deserves some modicum of sympathy. This is in stark contrast to the Japanese version where the oppressive sense of conformity hangs like a cloud over the character?s life.
For a movie that invites the audience to dance with it, it is never clear how ballroom dancing figures in John?s rediscovery of himself, other than one memorable scene where John is given a taste of the unbridled passion that underlies Latin dance by the dance instructress Paulina (played by Jennifer Lopez). Instead, we are expected to laugh at countless botched dance routines. Perhaps the movie producers understood Lopez?s limited acting range and decided against giving her anything more challenging to do than to look broodingly through studio windows.
Ultimately, "Shall We Dance" will probably achieve its goal and bring in the money for the studio and its backers. But it falls flat and I would still go for the original Japanese movie.
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