A cross-cultural tale of grief and dance, Josef Kubota Wladykaโs โHa-chan, Shake Your Booty!โ stems from an intimate place, but ends up emotionally inert thanks to its style. Its key strength is a committed lead performance from Rinko Kikuchi, who fits effortlessly into a role inspired by the directorโs mother. However, while trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movieโs impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. Itโs hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.
Forty-six-year-old Haru (Kikuchi) lives with her Mexican husband Luis (Alejandro Edda). As partners on the Tokyo ballroom circuit, they have an easygoing relationship, frankly critiquing each otherโs form while reviewing clips on a digital tablet over dinner. They also make an added effort to understand each other, and to be understood, by speaking not only in broken English, but in bits of each otherโs first languages too. The Japanese and Spanish subtitles are presented in different colors, allowing viewers to more easily nestle themselves in the coupleโs comfortable dynamic.
When Luis suddenly dies, Haru is left adrift. After his family insists on repatriating his remains, rather than having him cremated in Tokyo, she canโt find closure, and even imagines him visiting her in the inexplicable guise of a cutesy raven mascot. This makes โHa-chan, Shake Your Booty!โ the umpteenth recent American festival bow to follow this pattern โ death also took avian form in last yearโs Sundance premiere โThe Thing With Feathersโ and 2023โs โTuesdayโ โ though few of these films wield their symbolism with much depth or emotional nuance.
It certainly helps that Haru can be seen detaching herself from her friends and her hobbies over several months, but the filmโs ostensible turning point is a rather strange one. Forced by her longtime dancer pals to return to salsa, samba and cha-cha classes, sheโs immediately smitten with her new instructor, a Cuban man named Fedir (Alberto Guerra), though sheโs wracked with guilt at the very thought of acting on her feelings. This is a tremendous starting point for any story: Grief tends to take inexplicable forms, including the sensation that moving on romantically might be akin to cheating. Itโs through the language of infidelity and open marriage that Haru begins to navigate these complex feelings, but this symbolic mode of confronting death ends up superseding the underlying reality. Beyond a point, โHa-chanโ plays out with the relative simplicity of a film about white lies and infidelity, rather than one about mourning.
Wladyka, who has a mixed Japanese-Polish background and has spent considerable time directing in Latin America, gracefully navigates some of the filmโs cross-cultural specifics, which also result in an earwormy soundtrack drawn from Japanese and Latin influences. His visual approach, however, flattens the ensuing emotional layers. Thereโs a tongue-in-cheek quality to the way he films Haru and Luis, using crash zooms to enhance moments of mischievous infatuation ultimately built on trust. But itโs with this same visual language that he first brings Fedir into Haruโs purview as well, rendering the sensations of deep, fulfilling, decades-long romance and instantaneous lust with the exact same brushstrokes. It certainly doesnโt help that we arenโt granted nearly enough of Luisโs presence to eventually feel his absence, or enough by way of intoxicating movement before his death to contrast with stifling stillness afterwards.
Colorful chapter titles โ each announced with text cards and enthusiastic Japanese and English voiceover โ make โHa-chanโ feel akin to a bubbly Japanese game show, rather than a tale in which a womanโs perspective is tinted by emotional agony. Kikuchi, for her part, imbues the character with dimensions by turns gentle and thorny, but Haruโs unwillingness to meaningfully confront her loss is a blind spot that ends up applied to the story as a whole. The notion of grief gradually fades into the backdrop, finally re-emerging in a manner that is, thanks to the filmโs lumpy tonal mixture, more confusing than emotionally cleansing.
Occasional song-and-dance diversions are presented with dull simplicity, as the camera observes choreography at a distance, rather than embodying or enhancing it. And anytime a popular needle drop is deployed, it ends up harkening back to famous musical moments from better films, like โGoodfellasโ or โDirty Dancing.โ Even in its strongest moments, โHa-chan, Shake Your Booty!โ is cursed to set the bar much too high for itself. The result is mostly fine โ but just โfineโ canโt help but feel like a failing when the material has so much promise. In trying to make grief wholly digestible, Wladyka ends up making it bland.
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