Life isn’t a musical, but wow, how we wish it were sometimes. Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty is a film that prefers to get lost in clouds of enticing moves and make a convincing case for keeping those dreams alive. These dreams, however, are not about landing the big role or securing a contract for the stage. It’s just about dancing, falling in love, and trying to keep that funky fire lit amid the darkest times in life.

Haru, played with mesmerizing charm by Rinko Kikuchi, has an ideal life in Japan with her Mexican husband, Luis (Alejandro Edda). They spend their evenings playing records, watching dance competitions, and preparing for their own. Though nervous after getting all dressed up, the calm encouragement of Luis gets her out on the dance floor, where everything else seems to disappear. It doesn’t even matter if they win the competition. Watching her swoon while busting out some moves is so romantically rousing that it earns her a fantastical defiance of gravity in her visions.

The dance ends, however, for Luis when a heart attack hits him before the music stops. Deeply heartbroken, Haru is not exactly in the mood to celebrate her mid-40s birthday with her odd friends. They encourage her to get out there and find somebody, but there’s just nobody quite like Luis. That is, until she attends a dance class taught by the handsome instructor Fedir (Alberto Guerra). She is immediately smitten with this dancer, and her fantasies bubble up with desires for erotic dances. The only problem is that he’s married, but she might have a shot, as she learns that he has an open relationship. Desparate for recapturing those familiar physical sensations, Haru hatches a plan to frame herself as also being in an open relationship. It works for getting the moves she desires, but, of course, everybody can see how she’ll eventually stumble in his scheme.

This is one of those films where even when you can see the dance pattern on the floor, your eyes remain locked on the performance itself. Diced up into chapters, the film has plenty of room to explore more of Haru’s passions and subconscious with offbeat results. She grieves for Luis in her own strange way of remembering their favorite songs, but also in the form of seeing her former lover as a giant bird or, in a rather kinky dream, a threesome between her, Luis, and Fedir. These are absurd scenarios, but they offer much-needed comfort amid blunt dialogue about getting older, losing loved ones, and struggling to pick yourself up again. Rinko Kikuchi’s performance perfectly captures that progression and makes it intriguing. She’ll take notice of how open her friends are about sex, dating apps, and open relationships, and then cautiously try to find a way to make that work, struggling to conceal the embarrassment of what she’s trying to stage. I really felt for her, even during the expected scenes where everything blows up in her face. You can’t be too mad at her considering how good the romantic chemistry is when Haru and Fedir go from partners on the dance floor to partners in the bedroom.

The tone stays light as Haru focuses more on music and dance than on the best way to lament her loss or earnestly find another man. There’s an incredibly cute moment when Haru and Fedir go on a date to a musical that turns out to be a Japanese version of Dirty Dancing. And you better believe that Haru hallucinates herself up on that stage because why not. All that dancing looks like fun, and it makes Haru’s plight strong enough that you want to see her take bolder steps forward instead of crawling back into her sanctuary of records to cry alone. This is a woman who has some vocal passions that struggle to escape her mental prison of a woman in her 40s who fears that all paths are eroding. The moments when she brings that vivacious energy out resonate so well, and you want to see how many more steps she can take before the inevitable misstep.

I was charmed by how Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty, and it found just the right moves in its dance of grief, romance, and, well, dance. Such a film could easily go astray with its deception, but director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s thoughtful touches and a sweet performance by Rinko Kikuchi hold it together. I think it could explore the inkier depths of grief more than the odd notes it chooses, and those offbeat elements could go a little further to give this musical tale more bravado. But for the melody it chooses for hitting the dance floor, this movie works well enough, finding its groove once the music starts playing and the erotic allure starts pulsating. It’s not every romantic movie where you can indulge in a Japanese woman and a Mexican man bonding over dance and appreciating a Japanese production of Dirty Dancing, and this film lets us enjoy that unorthodox allure without ever putting its offbeat joy in the corner.

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