‘Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!’ Review: Rinko Kikuchi Dances Through Grief and Uneven Tones

A cross-cultural tale of grief and dance, Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!” 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, who fits effortlessly into a role inspired by the director’s mother. However, while trying to confront grief with a sense of mischief, the movie’s impish tonal approach takes the sting out of death a little too often, rendering its catharsis null. It’s hard not to respect a big swing, but Wladyka ultimately misses.

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Forty-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’s 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’s first languages too. The Japanese and Spanish subtitles are presented in different colors, allowing viewers to more easily nestle themselves in the couple’s comfortable dynamic.

When Luis suddenly dies, Haru is left adrift. After his family insists on repatriating his remains, rather than having him cremated in Tokyo, she can’t find closure, and even imagines him visiting her in the inexplicable guise of a cutesy raven mascot. This makes “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!” the umpteenth recent American festival bow to follow this pattern — death also took avian form in last year’s Sundance premiere “The Thing With Feathers” and 2023’s “Tuesday” — though few of these films wield their symbolism with much depth or emotional nuance.

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

Wladyka, who has a mixed Japanese-Polish background and has spent considerable time directing in Latin America, gracefully navigates some of the film’s 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’s 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’s with this same visual language that he first brings Fedir into Haru’s purview as well, rendering the sensations of deep, fulfilling, decades-long romance and instantaneous lust with the exact same brushstrokes. It certainly doesn’t help that we aren’t granted nearly enough of Luis’s presence to eventually feel his absence, or enough by way of intoxicating movement before his death to contrast with stifling stillness afterwards.

Colorful chapter titles — each announced with text cards and enthusiastic Japanese and English voiceover — make “Ha-chan” feel akin to a bubbly Japanese game show, rather than a tale in which a woman’s perspective is tinted by emotional agony. Kikuchi, for her part, imbues the character with dimensions by turns gentle and thorny, but Haru’s 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’s lumpy tonal mixture, more confusing than emotionally cleansing.

Occasional 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 “Goodfellas” or “Dirty Dancing.” Even in its strongest moments, “Ha-chan, Shake Your Booty!” is cursed to set the bar much too high for itself. The result is mostly fine — but just “fine” can’t 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.