Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! review
Cast: Rinko Kikuchi, Alberto Guerra, Alejandro Edda, YOU, Yoh Yoshida, Damián Alcázar
Director: Josef Kubota Wladyka
Star rating: ★★★★
There’s no way life can be categorised from one feeling to another. It is a long, absurd, tragicomedy- where everything and nothing is serious. It might as well be outrageous the next second. How else to make sense of this unfair world? Don’t try to make too much out of it in the first place, suggests the new entry at this year’s Sundance Film Festival: Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! Right from its eyebrow-raising title, this Japanese film pulls the viewer into its unpredictable world of dance and drama, and refuses to let go. You expect a musical, but this is so much more. It is fantastical, vibrant and bursting with life.
The premise
Rinko Kikuchi, who earned an Oscar nomination for her breakout turn in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel two decades ago, gets the role of a lifetime as Haru. She lives with her husband and dance partner, Luis (Alejandro Edda), and seems to be living a content life in their suburban Tokyo home. Together, they are preparing to compete in the latest edition of Tokyo’s ballroom dance scene. Their first dance starts off like a dream, perhaps the last pleasant dream Haru will have in a while, as Luis drops and falls. He suffers a cardiac arrest and dies.
Haru’s life is shattered in one evening. Her friends, Yuki (Yoh Yoshida) and Hiro (YOU, in a hilarious supporting role), try hard to bring her out of isolation. They enrol in a dance class together. However, what must she do with her sudden attraction to the handsome instructor Fedir (Alberto Guerra)? At home, her grief sits beside her and envelops her like a blanket. Haru soon learns that Fedir is in an open marriage, and although the concept bewilders her, she decides to step up.
What works
The film’s inclusion of Luis after his death, dressed in a huge crow costume, is hilariously tragic. Haru finds a strange sense of comfort knowing that Luis will arrive like that and flap his wings for a giant hug. The absurd humour is so unique to Josef Kubota Wladyka’s portrait of a woman figuring out how to reorient her life after the tragedy.
This is a film that understands what it means to live with grief, but also how necessary it is to move on. There’s heartbreak, a giant vacuum in Haru’s life that no one can fill, but she must step out nevertheless. Divided into six chapters and an epilogue, Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! is compulsively co-written by Nicholas Huynh and Wladyka, with the musical numbers filling the frame with joyous afterglow. Even as the film slows down in the later chapters as the momentum drops, there is no way you will be able to predict what Haru does next to keep the spark alive.
Final thoughts
Kikuchi is a treat to watch, her face alive to every emotional hook that the film so confidently holds on to. What a joy it is to see her dance! Her musical numbers are the film’s many treats. The actor brings a fragility to her presence; her Haru is someone who has lost her balance in life. Some of her actions will be unhinged, and just when you feel she has gone too far, a twitch and a glance from Kikuchi pulls the judgment away from the front door. Haru is still alive, and she must live. She must continue to dream and dance. Wladyka has delivered a genuine crowd-pleaser with Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! It is funny, sad, delicious, and most importantly, filled with a giant heart.
Santanu Das is covering the Sundance Film Festival as part of the accredited press.
