A cross-cultural tale of grief and dance, Josef Kubota Władyka’s “Ha-chan, shake your ass!” comes from an intimate place but ends up being emotionally inert thanks to its style. Its main strength is Rinko Kikuchi’s committed lead performance, who effortlessly fits into a role inspired by the director’s mother. But while attempting to confront grief with mischievousness, the film’s brash tonal approach uses the death sting a bit too much, nullifying its catharsis. You can’t help but respect the big swing, but Uwadika ends up missing.
46-year-old Haru (Kikuchi) lives with her Mexican husband Luis (Alejandro Edda). As partners on Tokyo’s ballroom circuit, they have an easy rapport, candidly critiquing each other’s form while reviewing clips on a digital tablet over dinner. They also go the extra mile to understand and be understood by each other by speaking not only in broken English but also in each other’s first language. The Japanese and Spanish subtitles are displayed in different colors, allowing viewers to more easily place themselves in the couple’s comfortable dynamic.
Lewis suddenly dies, leaving Hal adrift. Her family insists that her remains be repatriated rather than cremated in Tokyo, but she remains undecided and even imagines him visiting her in the form of a cute crow mascot. Now it becomes “Haa-chan, shake your butt!” It’s the 10th recent American festival to follow this pattern, with Death taking the form of a bird in last year’s Sundance premiere of “The Feathered Thing” and 2023’s “Tuesday,” but few of those films express that symbolism with the depth or emotional nuance.
It certainly helps to see Hal distance himself from his friends and hobbies over several months, but the film’s ostensible turning point is rather strange. Forced by her longtime dancers to return to salsa, samba, and cha-cha classes, she quickly falls in love with her new instructor, a Cuban man named Fedil (Alberto Guerra), but the thought of acting on her feelings makes her feel guilty. This is a very important starting point for any story. Grief tends to take unexplainable forms, including the feeling that continuing a romantic relationship may be akin to cheating. Hal begins to navigate these complex emotions through the language of infidelity and open marriage, but this symbolic mode of confronting death is eventually replaced by an underlying reality. Beyond a certain point, “Haa-chan” is less of a dirge movie and more of a relatively straightforward take on a movie about white lies and infidelity.
Władyka, who has a mixed Japanese-Polish background and has spent much of his time directing in Latin America, gracefully navigates some of the film’s cross-cultural idiosyncrasies, resulting in a haunting soundtrack that also draws from Japanese and Latin influences. But his visual approach flattens the subsequent layers of emotion. There’s a tongue-in-cheek quality to the way he films Hal and Lewis, using crashing zooms to emphasize moments of mischievous infatuation that are ultimately built on trust. But it’s this same visual language that first brings Fedil into Hal’s sights, expressing a deep, fulfilling, decades-long romance and a momentary sense of desire in exactly the same strokes. It certainly doesn’t help that we are not given enough of Lewis’s presence to feel his absence in the end, or by the euphoric movement before his death that contrasts with the stifling stillness of his death.
The colorful chapter titles, each announced with text cards and enthusiastic Japanese and English narration, make “Haa-chan” feel more like a light-hearted Japanese game show than a female-perspective tale colored by emotional pain. Kikuchi imbues his characters with dimension, alternately gentle and thorny, but Haru’s refusal to meaningfully face his loss is a blind spot that applies throughout the story. The concept of sadness gradually fades into the background, eventually reappearing in a way that, thanks to the film’s rugged tonal mix, is more confusing than emotionally cleansing.
The occasional song-and-dance diversions are rendered with boring simplicity, as the camera observes the choreography from a distance rather than embodying or enhancing it. And every time the popular needle drop unfolds, it ends up reminding us of famous musical moments from great movies like “Goodfellas” and “Dirty Dancing.” Even in its most intense moments, “Haa-chan, please shake your butt!” is cursed with its own bar being set too high. The results are mostly okay, but when you have so many expectations for the material, just calling it “problematic” can’t help but feel like a failure. In trying to make grief completely digestible, Uwadika makes it bland.
