Dance With Me (5 Stars)

Tonight I sat down to watch another film in the online Japanese Film Festival, not knowing what to expect. With the exception of Hideo Nakata, none of the directors are known to me. Wham! Where did this film come from? The director Shinobu Yaguchi is supposedly very popular in Japan, but hardly any of his films have been released with English subtitles. I hope "Dance with me" will be an exception, because I really need to see it again.

Shizuka is a young woman who works designing web pages for a large Japanese company. One weekend she has to look after her sister's daughter, so she takes her to a fairground. The girl is scared because she has to take part in a school musical. She visits a hypnotist's tent, and she asks him to make her lose her fear of dancing. The hypnosis has no effect on the girl, but it has a big effect on Shizuka. Every time she hears music she can't control herself, she has to start singing and dancing. This happens in the most inappropriate situations. What makes it even worse is that when she's dancing she's in a trance and thinks everyone else is dancing with her. Usually that isn't true.

The second half of the film turns into a road movie, as she drives across Japan trying to find the hypnotist, who's now on tour. She gathers friends on her journey who like to dance with her. There are also gangsters chasing the hypnotist, because he owes them money. The women travelling with her aren't mentally stable. There's a lot of laugh-out-loud comedy.

I love this film. I strongly doubt there will be another film of this quality in the festival.

This is a film that's begging for a Hollywood remake. I say this, because it needs English language songs to reach a wider audience. I just hope that the remake remains as close as possible to the original. Just change the songs and leave everything else the same.