Strictly Shohei

"Shall We Dance?" (12) Screen at D'Olier Street, Dublin

A feel-good movie which has been a major hit in its native Japan and one of the few significant arthouse hits of last year in the US, Shall We Dance? is a gentle, humorous and touching romantic comedy elegantly directed by Masayuki Suo.

Its focus is Shohei, a conservative 42-year-old businessman ostensibly happy with his wife and young daughter, their newly-acquired suburban home with its own garden, and his job as a corporate executive. But he is tired and stressed out, and feels there's something lacking in his life. Commuting home by train every evening, he becomes more and more intrigued by Mai, the young woman he regularly sees gazing out the window of a ballroom dancing studio.

Shohei eventually plucks up the courage to enrol at the school, hoping to receive private lessons from Mai; when these prove too expensive for him, he settles for group lessons from an older teacher. Even though learning to dance was not his motivation for joining the school, he soon begins to get involved with the class and to enjoy his lessons, gaining a new confidence on the dance floor and in life. Soon he's even practising his steps while sitting at his desk or waiting on a station platform. But ballroom dancing is viewed with suspicion in Japan, so Shohei does not dare tell any of his colleagues about his secret life as a dancer - apart from one colleague who is flamboyantly transformed by taking lessons at the same school - and he certainly does not dare tell his wife. Observing the changes in his behaviour and suspecting him of having an affair, she hires a couple of private detectives to follow him. Although labelled a Japanese Strictly Ballroom, Masayuki Suo's film shares no more than its ballroom dancing milieu with the exuberant Australian film, and it is altogether more reserved - a contrast reflecting the different cultures which produced the two movies.

Shall We Dance? is not without its longueurs, but there remains much to enjoy in this charming and entertaining picture, a crowd-pleaser in the best sense of the term. Shohei is played in a subtle, credible performance by the versatile Koji Yakusho, from Tampopo and Unagi (The Eel), while in her film debut as Mai, the ballet dancer Tamiyo Takenaka grows in the role of a reclusive woman who believes her best dancing days are past.

By Michael Dwyer

"Amy Foster" (15) Savoy, Dublin and selected cinemas nationwide

Based on a Joseph Conrad short story, Beeban Kidron's 19th-century romantic tragedy is a strange mixture of genres - a bodice-ripping romance which tips its hat to 1990s feminism and New Age mysticism. It's as if The Piano had been made by Oliver Stone instead of Jane Campion.

As in Campion's film, Kidron's heroine is a young woman who has adopted muteness as a form of resistance and a defence against the brutal and narrow-minded society which oppresses her. Amy Foster (impressively played by Rachel Weisz), the first offspring of a scandalous union, is regarded as a semi-idiot by her neighbours in the remote Cornish community where she has grown up (the setting has been relocated from Conrad's Kent). But we gradually discover that she has a hidden, almost paganistic love of the sea which crashes so melodramatically and over-emphatically against the nearby cliffs. When a ship carrying European emigrants to the New World sinks off the coast, only one of its passengers survives, the handsome Russian Yanko (Vincent Perez). He is, at first, also taken for an idiot by the locals, but gradually establishes a friendship with the local doctor (Ian McKellen). Despite the intolerance of the locals, romance blossoms between Amy and Yanko, and with the support of the doctor, they manage to marry and set up home together, but their ostracisation has tragic consequences for Yanko.

This is all handled as breathless melodrama by Kidron, whose last film was the unimpressive "drag spectacular" To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything!, Julie Newmar. Waves crash against rocks, and ignorant, gurning yokels threaten violence at every turn. Whenever possible, Weisz and Perez are silhouetted in tragically handsome poses against impossibly dramatic landscapes, while John Barry's over-the-top score batters any remaining senses into submission. The two lovers are as well played and attractive as possible in the circumstances, but the whole film teeters perilously on the edge of high camp, and one wishes that it would finally fall over (in fact it does at one point, when Weisz and Perez consummate their love for the first time in a rock pool lit to look like a Californian hot tub).

By Hugh Linehan

"Western" (Members and Guests) IFC

Winner of the critics' prize at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Manuel Poirier's picaresque road movie is an engagingly offbeat meditation on the human need for affection and companionship. Sergi Lopez plays Paco, a suave Spanish salesman who loses his job when his car is stolen by the diminutive Russian vagrant, Nino (Sacha Bourdo). When their paths cross again, the two form an unlikely alliance and set off on a meandering hitch-hiking journey around Brittany, getting drunk and propositioning women along the way. Lopez has far more luck in these romantic endeavours than his companion, and as the trip progresses it becomes more and more of a quest for love on behalf of the tragi-comic Nino.

Poirier's affectionate, apparently ramshackle style is in sympathy with his off-beat perceptiveness about human nature. The Breton landscape through which Paco and Nino move will look familiar to an Irish eye, and its shabby fishing villages, dilapidated inns and litter-strewn roadsides chime well with the director's obvious delight in his characters' likeable imperfections. Once you accept that, like Paco and Nino themselves, Western is going nowhere in particular, it becomes possible just to relax and enjoy the trip. But be warned - it's a journey which goes on too long, and its ending seems somewhat forced compared to what has gone before.

By Hugh Linehan

"Love Etc" (Members and Guests), IFC

A more familiar sort of French romance can be found in Marian Vernoux's adaptation of Julian Barnes's novel, Talking It Over. Despite the English setting of Barnes's original, the transposition to a Parisian bourgeois milieu seems so natural as to be inevitable, while the subject matter - two best friends who fall obsessively in love with the same woman - is recognisable from countless films of the last 40 years. There's nothing particularly startling about Vernoux's stylistic approach, either. Love Etc is handsomely photographed by the cinematographer Eric Gautier in what has become almost a generic "French chic" style, and Alexandre Desplat's music score owes more than a little to Michael Nyman.

But originality isn't everything, and the competent predictability of all these elements allows Vernoux to concentrate on her three protagonists. Yvan Attal plays Benoit, the repressed banker who falls in love with fine-art restorer Marie (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who in turn becomes the object of obsession for Benoit's extrovert friend Pierre (Charles Berling). As the romantic triangle is played through to its inevitable denouement, all three give performances of some resonance and depth. It might have been expected that a female director would attempt to break free from the characterisation of the woman as "enigma" in this sort of thing, but Vernoux seems most interested in attempting to explore the male perspective, which she accomplishes with some subtlety. Love Etc may not break any new ground, but it covers familiar terrain with confidence and should find an appreciative audience.

By Hugh Linehan

"Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel And Laurence" (15s) Nationwide

Like last week's Sliding Doors, the cumbersomely-titled Martha, Meet Frank, Daniel And Laurence is a romantic comedy set against the backdrop of 1990s Swinging London, but there the resemblance ends. Writer Peter Morgan's previous credits include the dreadful King Ralph, so he doesn't necessarily possess the subtle touch, and his screenplay here is a straitjacket from which director Nick Hamm seems unwilling or unable to escape.

Monica Potter is Martha, a young American woman whose life isn't working out. Buying the cheapest ticket she can find to get out of Minneapolis, she finds herself sitting beside the brash young music biz executive Daniel (Tom Hollander), who becomes besotted with her. When Potter disappears on her arrival in London, Hollander confesses his problem to his best friends Frank (Rufus Sewell) and Laurence (Joseph Fiennes). Over the next day, through a series of coincidences guaranteed to stretch the credulity of even the most broad-minded audience, Potter ends up spending time with all three friends, and is finally faced with making a choice, which she proceeds to do in an ending of quite stunning banality.

All the characters are badly sketched, and (with the exception of Potter) not particularly likeable. Hollander, Sewell and Fiennes are viewed in some quarters as three stars-in-the-making of the new British cinema, so one can only hope that their one-note performances here are due to the direction from the appropriately-named Hamm.