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Suo Masayuki, one of Japan\u2019s most ingratiating directors, found an international triumph with Shall We Dance?<\/em> (1996). He had started his career with an odd little softcore porn film, Abnormal Family<\/em> (1983), shot as an admiring pastiche of Ozu\u2019s style. His Fancy Dance<\/em> (1989) was also fun, but he really hit his stride with Sumo Do, Sumo Don\u2019t<\/em> (1992), which remains a sure-fire crowd pleaser.<\/p>\n Suo worked comic variations on an ingenious theme: How Japanese youth fail to appreciate the beauty of their traditional culture. The garage-band ska singer in Fancy Dance<\/em> is obliged to retreat to a monastery, where he discovers that Zen is really, really cool. Sumo Do<\/em> converts sullen college kids to the virtues of ritualized wrestling. Shall We Dance?<\/em> works in reverse, obliging an uptight salaryman to rekindle his marriage by learning ballroom dance. Suo’s films celebrate pleasurable fusions between Asian and Western cultures.<\/p>\n Suo\u2019s meticulous, understated style is a kind of modern revision of Ozu\u2019s. Fancy Dance<\/em> and Sumo Do<\/em> pay homage to the master\u2019s college comedies, and in Shall We Dance?<\/em> the first tracking shot occurs when the hero takes his first tentative dance steps. In Figures Traced in Light<\/em>, I mention Suo as part of that trend toward planimetric shooting and compass-point cutting I discussed in an earlier blog<\/a>. As you see from the opening images, he tries out the precise sort of graphic matching between shots that was a hallmark of Ozu’s style.<\/p>\n In Suo\u2019s new film, a young man is accused of groping a schoolgirl in the subway. It\u2019s a daring move for a director known for light comedies. The film stars Kase Ryo, from Letters from Iwo Jima<\/em>, and veteran Yakusho Koji, seen most recently in Babel<\/em>. Read more about it here<\/a>, noting that the Economist<\/em>\u2019s contents tend to evaporate into the pay-only archive. The film\u2019s official website, in English, is here<\/a>.<\/p>\n I Just Didn\u2019t Do It<\/em>, Suo says, is a film \u201cI simply had<\/em> to make.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Suo Masayuki, one of Japan\u2019s most ingratiating directors, found an international triumph with Shall We Dance? (1996). He had started his career with an odd little softcore porn film, Abnormal Family (1983), shot as an admiring pastiche of Ozu\u2019s style. His Fancy Dance (1989) was also fun, but he really hit his stride with Sumo […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,55,198,1,5,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asian-cinema","category-directors-ozu-yasujiro","category-directors-suo-masayuki","category-film-comments","category-film-technique","category-national-cinemas-japan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45021,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/45021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/i-just-didnt-1-2001.jpg\" "\\"i-just-didnt-1-200\\"")
<\/a>Suo has been very quiet for the last decade, but now he\u2019s back. I Just Didn\u2019t Do It<\/em> is arousing keen local interest, partly because of its controversial subject matter. Japan is known as a low-crime society, but gradually questions of police brutality have emerged. Suspects can be kept in custody for up to 23 days, and unique among industrial nations, 95% of all people arrested confess!<\/p>\n