It’s okay to be messy. That’s life, you know?
Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!‘s titular Ha-chan (Rinko Kikuchi) has a pretty ordinary and tidy life when we first meet her. She is happily married to Luis (Alberto Guerra) and they share a mutual passion for ballroom dancing. But life has a way of complicating things. Luis collapses during a dance competition and dies. Ha-chan is now left without her partner in dancing and life, and must reconstruct her identity and learn what moving on looks like for her.
Ha-chan and Luis aren’t codependent, but they are very interdependent. A big part of that interdependence is their chosen hobby: ballroom dancing requires a partner. So Ha-chan’s loss of Luis also comes with the loss of the thing she is most passionate about—how can she dance if it’s not with Luis? She enters into a period of despondency, only leaving her house when her friends forcibly enter and take her to a dance class. At that dance class, she meets new instructor Fedir (Alejandro Edda), an object of lust for all the students. Ha-chan is smitten, too, but conflicted about these desires as she grieves Luis.
All of this is portrayed with a visual flair and costuming befitting a movie about ballroom dance. We see plenty of dance through the characters’ activities and interests, but the film also dispenses with realism and takes us inside Ha-chan’s imagination in some cool moments. These imagined elements have a nice playfulness to them and are an inventive way to incorporate more elaborate dance numbers without the film being a true musical.
Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! is delightfully multicultural. Ha-chan and Luis speak Japanese, Spanish, and English interchangeably, and their home is a veritable mash-up of their cultures, but outside their home, culture clashes abound. Luis’s family disagrees with Ha-chan about his body, preferring a burial in Mexico to a traditional Japanese cremation. Fedir’s open relationship intrigues the Japanese friends, who see it as very European—but it quickly leads to jealousy.
The film is strongest when it follows the thread of the natural, situational tensions of its premise. Dating again after losing a spouse is understandably difficult, and the film sketches Ha-chan’s emotional journey in some very fresh ways. The film has a lovely way of visualizing Ha-chan’s emotions rather than expositing them, including Luis’s specter appearing to Ha-chan in an oversized bird costume throughout the film.
Unfortunately, Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! feels the need to add some artificial tension to the proceedings as well. Ha-chan gets ensnared in a series of lies to Fedir and her friends that she must go to increasing lengths to maintain. It’s a classic Sundance plot contrivance, but here the lies are pretty irrational and silly. It’s a shame, because the movie doesn’t need this device to generate tension—it already has plenty of tension through the thoughtfully constructed themes about grief and becoming ready to move on. The lies are ineffective in creating tension because Ha-chan could come clean at any point and make things better, a course that most rational people would take.
Coming to terms with our own messiness is a theme of the movie. The problem is, Ha-chan’s messiness doesn’t make logical sense, which makes her less relatable at best and a stereotype at worst. But once the lies are unraveled, Ha-chan’s messiness continues, taking the movie into some fun hijinks-y territory by the end. The film weaves humorous elements throughout its runtime in pleasing ways and really shines in its third act. Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty! smooths over its plot contrivances with style and humor, while giving its theme of moving on after losing a partner the breathing room and nuance it needs.
