{"id":424759,"date":"2026-01-23T09:54:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T09:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/424759\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T09:54:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T09:54:08","slug":"a-dance-through-grief-and-uneven-tones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/424759\/","title":{"rendered":"A Dance Through Grief and Uneven Tones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tA cross-cultural tale of grief and dance, Josef Kubota Wladyka<\/a>\u2019s \u201cHa-chan, Shake Your Booty!\u201d 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<\/a>, who fits effortlessly into a role inspired by the director\u2019s mother. However, while trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movie\u2019s impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. It\u2019s hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.<\/p>\n

\n\tForty-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 other\u2019s 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 other\u2019s first languages too. The Japanese and Spanish subtitles are presented in different colors, allowing viewers to more easily nestle themselves in the couple\u2019s comfortable dynamic.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Luis suddenly dies, Haru is left adrift. After his family insists on repatriating his remains, rather than having him cremated in Tokyo, she can\u2019t find closure, and even imagines him visiting her in the inexplicable guise of a cutesy raven mascot. This makes \u201cHa-chan, Shake Your Booty!\u201d the umpteenth recent American festival bow to follow this pattern \u2014 death also took avian form in last year\u2019s Sundance premiere \u201cThe Thing With Feathers\u201d and 2023\u2019s \u201cTuesday\u201d \u2014 though few of these films wield their symbolism with much depth or emotional nuance.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt certainly helps that Haru can be seen detaching herself from her friends and her hobbies over several months, but the film\u2019s ostensible turning point is a rather strange one. Forced by her longtime dancer pals to return to salsa, samba and cha-cha classes, she\u2019s immediately smitten with her new instructor, a Cuban man named Fedir (Alberto Guerra), though she\u2019s 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. It\u2019s 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, \u201cHa-chan\u201d plays out with the relative simplicity of a film about white lies and infidelity, rather than one about mourning.<\/p>\n

\n\tWladyka, who has a mixed Japanese-Polish background and has spent considerable time directing in Latin America, gracefully navigates some of the film\u2019s 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. There\u2019s 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 it\u2019s with this same visual language that he first brings Fedir into Haru\u2019s purview as well, rendering the sensations of deep, fulfilling, decades-long romance and instantaneous lust with the exact same brushstrokes. It certainly doesn\u2019t help that we aren\u2019t granted nearly enough of Luis\u2019s presence to eventually feel his absence, or enough by way of intoxicating movement before his death to contrast with stifling stillness afterwards.<\/p>\n

\n\tColorful chapter titles \u2014 each announced with text cards and enthusiastic Japanese and English voiceover \u2014 make \u201cHa-chan\u201d feel akin to a bubbly Japanese game show, rather than a tale in which a woman\u2019s perspective is tinted by emotional agony. Kikuchi, for her part, imbues the character with dimensions by turns gentle and thorny, but Haru\u2019s 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 film\u2019s lumpy tonal mixture, more confusing than emotionally cleansing.<\/p>\n

\n\tOccasional 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 \u201cGoodfellas\u201d or \u201cDirty Dancing.\u201d Even in its strongest moments, \u201cHa-chan, Shake Your Booty!\u201d is cursed to set the bar much too high for itself. The result is mostly fine \u2014 but just \u201cfine\u201d can\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A cross-cultural tale of grief and dance, Josef Kubota Wladyka\u2019s \u201cHa-chan, Shake Your Booty!\u201d stems from an intimate…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":424760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,202263,202264,206,202265,98265],"class_list":["post-424759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ha-chan-shake-your-booty","tag-josef-kubota-wladyka","tag-movies","tag-rinko-kikuchi","tag-sundance-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=424759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/424759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/424760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=424759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=424759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=424759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}