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Review
by
Kevin Ma: |
From Sumo Do,
Sumo Don't to Swing Girls, Japanese
filmmakers are great at making crowd-pleasing
comedies about ragtag groups of amateurs beating
the odds. However, even though they've mastered
a certain brand of silliness, the genre has always
lacked in dramatic storytelling. After helming
teen dramas and films about ethnic Koreans in
Japan, Korean-Japanese filmmaker Sang-Il Lee decides
to tackle this popular commercial formula with
Hula Girls, a true story about a town trying
to save itself in a rather unorthodox way. Showered
with acclaim - the film represented Japan at the
Oscars and won Best Picture at the Japan Academy
Awards - Hula Girls has quite a reputation
to live up to. Good thing it does. Honestly, it's
easy to see why Hula Girls was so loved
in its home country.
Hula Girls takes
place in 1965 Iwaki, a small Northern town whose
townspeople rely on nearby coal mines for their
livelihood. As Japan's post-war economy blossoms,
oil has taken the place of coal, bringing down
the coal mines one by one. With lay-offs and the
shutdown of the local mine imminent, a company
official (Ittoku Kishibe) decides to build a Hawaiian
center/hot springs to boost the local economy.
The main attraction of this center? Hula dancing.
The problem, in addition to Iwaki looking more
like a winter wonderland than Hawaii, is that
few girls in town are willing to bare any skin
to perform Hula dancing. Nevertheless, the plan
still attracts Sanae (Eri Tokunaga), a girl who
dreams of leaving the mines, as well as her best
friend Kimiko (Yu Aoi), housewife Hatsuko, and
tomboy Sayuri. The company also hires Hirayama
(Yasuko Matsuyuki), a professional Hula dancer
who was part of an elite dance troupe in Tokyo.
But Hirayama isn't particularly interested in
teaching a ragtag group of misfits how to Hula
dance in a rural town; she's only doing it for
the money to clear her debt with some unsavory
characters back in town.
Meanwhile, the miners
aren't particularly supportive of the whole idea
because it will only create a fraction of the
jobs that a mine closure will eliminate. When
Kimiko's widowed mother Chiyo, who is also head
of the miners' wives association, catches her
daughter Hula dancing, she becomes upset at her
daughter. But Kimiko is so committed to Hula dancing
that she runs away and moves into the dance center.
The dancers are in place, but the reluctant Hirayama-sensei
realizes that none of her four dancers can dance
to save their lives. However, that's nothing a
quick montage can't fix. With the mine closure
approaching, the women of the town actually begin
to embrace the idea of the Hawaiian center, and
another montage later, Iwaki's got its own Hula
dance troupe. But that's only half the journey
- the center still has to be built, and the people
still have to show up.
Considering that the
real-life Hawaiian center in Iwaki is now a nationally-known
hot springs resort, it's safe to say that the
journey in Hula Girls is far more important
than the destination. Naturally, the film offers
a clichéd "never give up" message that preaches
what a team of misfits can achieve, but Lee and
his team know that there is more at stake than
just self-esteem. Behind the comedy of the troupe's
less-than-stellar dancing skills lies an entire
town's future, and Lee never steers far from the
serious issues. A throwaway joke about a landscaper's
naïve attempt to keep a palm tree warm in the
freezing conditions may be played for laughs,
but it becomes an essential point in the development
of the plot. Hula Girls works as a comedy,
but Lee also succeeds in creating dramatic tension
without making the film too downbeat. It's a precarious
balance, but Lee amazingly makes the whole thing
look easy.
The film also succeeds
because unlike most sports films about misfits,
Lee doesn't rely on stereotypes to shape the characters.
While clichéd characters fill the Hula Girls screenplay, Lee and his co-writer Daisuke Habara
place the situation on established characters
instead of using the situation to establish the
characters. Of course, Hula Girls wouldn't
be a crowd-pleaser if the characters didn't change
over the course of the film. You know Kimiko's
mother will eventually come around, and Hirayama
will eventually come to drop her "reluctant teacher"
attitude - but these changes don't come from some
sudden epiphany during the third act. Rather,
the arcs come from within the characters' personalities.
As is common in most commercial films, Hula
Girls leans towards big emotional moments,
but the emotions remain genuine because of the
characters. Sure, scenes like the troupe's impromptu
performance on a train platform would probably
never happen in real life, but Lee foreshadows
enough throughout that he actually earns the moment
as opposed to calculating it.
On the surface, Hula
Girls doesn't have the high-class pedigree
of your run-of-the-mill Best Picture winner. But
the Japan Academy does have a history of awarding
warm, family-friendly crowd-pleasers rather than
expensive epic productions, and Hula Girls is no exception. By no means is Hula Girls mind-blowing or even all that original. It relies
on age-old formulas and traditional emotion-manipulation
strategies to please audiences, but at least it
does so with likeable characters, strong performances
(especially from Yu Aoi in a spirited award-winning
performance), and a script that has its heart
in the right place. Who needs expensive production
values and originality when you already have all
of that? (Kevin Ma 2007)
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