In ‘Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!,’ Dance and Desire Are Remedies for Grief

When Haru meets Fedir—whose wife is a Paris-based dance champion, though the marriage is an open one—she glimpses fresh possibilities, or at least just an adventure. In an early scene, after she and Fedir have had a pleasant, platonic dinner together, they’re ready to part ways in the street. A crew of drunken businessmen jostle Haru, and Fedir stands up for her. What follows is a cleverly choreographed dream ballet—though the genre is actually the bachata, one of the dance forms Fedir teaches, its movements an expression of longing and heartache—in which Fedir defends Haru’s honor against this gang of boorish men. Other passersby join in, and the scene becomes a metaphor for the act of rejoining life. By the end of the evening, Haru and Fedir have tumbled into bed.

Their two hookups are enjoyable and tender—until the wife shows up, and Haru realizes she has feelings she can’t control. Kikuchi shifts gears smoothly: One minute, she shows how Haru is nearly deadened by sorrow. The next, her exhilaration becomes a kind of artificial sunshine. But a flash of anger and jealousy causes her to act out, in a scene that makes you recoil a bit even as you laugh. Kikuchi is perhaps best known for her roles in movies like Babel and Pacific Rim, as well as HBO’s Tokyo Vice, several episodes of which Wladyka directed. Here, she captures the spirit of a woman who longs to get back to being herself, if only she could remember who that self was. Haru is both breezy and cautious, and totally lost. By the movie’s end, she has found her way forward, because she realizes there’s no going back. She’ll have to be a new person, encompassing the experiences and memories of the old one. Kikuchi captures that difficult butterfly transition as it unfolds; it’s both painful and funny to watch. But in the end, she shows us how Haru finds her way back to the music, which is the only way she can move into the future, one note, and one dance step, at a time.