The film opens with a man, Shohei Sugiyama (Koji Yakusyo), who is on a corporate treadmill in Japan. He has a loving wife and child and a house in the suburbs, but his life is missing an indefinable something.

One night, he sees a beautiful, melancholy girl, Mai Kishikawa (Tamiyo Kusakari) in a dance studio through the subway window, and so, inexorably, is drawn to the studio. What starts out as an infatuation, turns into a serious fling, with dance.

Sugiyama discovers a fellow worker, Tomio Aoki (Naoto Takenaka), who also has a secret life as a dancer. Aoki dances with wild abandon, but in the office, he is a meek, unassuming man. Both men hide their passion for dancing from their fellow workers, who scorn dancing. Sugiyama also hides his dancing from his family.

In one memorable scene, Sugiyama and Kishikawa share their innermost feelings. He explains to her that she was really the reason he started dancing, but that the dancing itself became important.

The cinematography by Naoki Kayano is excellent throughout the film, as director Masayuki Suo uses largely silent footage to establish Sugiyama's loneliness. He uses point-of-view footage on the shots of Sugiyama watching the lovely Kishikawa through the subway window on his way home at night. The dancing shots, with the fully-saturated colors of the ornate ballrooms and colorful costumes, are glorious. The use of hand-held cameras enhances the speed and motion of some of the dances.

The acting by all of the principle actors is great. One thing that American audiences might notice about Japanese films like this one, is there tends to be fewer "reaction shots," closeups of the actor reacting to something that was said or done. Here, the reactions are done in the context of the shot, including the other characters.

This is one of those films that would probably make my best 10 films list, but the question is, which year. It came out in 1996 in Japan as "Shall We Dansu?" and is being distributed in 1997 under its English title by Miramax films, a subsidiary of Disney. It is a Japanese film with English subtitles. It rates an A.

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