Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!

New Showbiz Analysis

Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! opens with the vibrant, colorful chaos of Tokyo’s ballroom scene, a space where bodies move and grief is danced away. The film’s argument is that intimacy—whether with the living or the dead—is the primary currency of survival. Haru, played with magnetic intensity by Rinko Kikuchi, is the engine of this narrative, her fantasies of her dead husband Luis (Alejandro Edda) dressed as a giant black bird serving as a surreal bridge between memory and desire. The film’s visual style, praised for its buoyancy, mirrors Haru’s internal state: a kaleidoscope of color and motion that refuses to settle into static mourning. The sold meaning is one of fluidity and reinvention. Haru’s infatuation with Fedir (Alberto Guerra), a Latin American instructor in an open marriage, is not a betrayal of her past but an expansion of her present. The film treats her open marriage and subsequent emotional entanglements with a lightness that challenges traditional narratives of widowhood. However, the film’s internal logic pulls apart when Haru’s actions escalate from fantasy to vandalism and jail. The camera loves Haru’s agency, but the consequences of her actions are handled with a surreal detachment that borders on the absurd. The last image, Haru helping Luis back into his bird costume, suggests that her grief is not resolved but rather integrated into her ongoing performance of life. The film’s argument is that to dance is to accept the chaos of existence, even when it leads to a night in jail. The ending is not a moral verdict but a continuation of the dance, a refusal to let death have the last word.