Shall We Dance? (1996)

A perfectly respectable life can be exactly the reason you feel something is missing. Masayuki Suo's "Shall We Dance?" stars Koji Yakusho as Shohei Sugiyama, a quiet, dutiful accountant who's grown bored with his orderly routine. Every evening on his train ride home, he looks up at a beautiful woman gazing wistfully out the window of the Kishikawa Dance School. One night, he finally gets off the train, walks into the studio and signs up for a ballroom dancing class. Before long, he's so hooked that he's practicing his steps on the train platform and under his desk at work, and he gets good enough to enter a competition. Meanwhile, his wife grows so suspicious about his late nights and the hint of perfume he brings home that she hires a private detective to find out what's going on. Among the colorful characters Sugiyama meets at the studio is his own coworker Aoki (Naoto Takenaka), a mousy office nerd who transforms into a hilariously flamboyant, bad-wigged Latin dancer. Aoki explains that once he's in costume and moving to the music, he feels completely happy and totally free. That's the film's greatest charm - the contrast between the intensely competitive women at the studio, including the elegant instructor who first caught Sugiyama's eye, Mai (Tamiyo Kusakari), and the men who dance purely for the joy of it. Released in Japan in 1996, it shares some of the spirit of the flamboyant Australian favorite "Strictly Ballroom," but it's especially memorable for setting the openness of social dance against Japan's buttoned-up culture, where public displays of emotion are rare. Even there, it turns out, the joy of dance is impossible to resist.