Hula Girls sounds, from its title, like the many Japanese movies about loser heroes who take up minor sports or performing arts (sumo wrestling, ballroom dancing, rowing, synchronized swimming, swing jazz) and find their respective grooves. These films usually end with a big, rousing finale, in which the heroes exhibit their hard-won skills and show us that the waltz, say, is, guess what! - really cool.
Though it follows this formula, the latest film by director Lee Sang-il also departs from it in ways reminiscent of The Full Monty and Urayama Kiriro's 1962 classic Foundry Town (Kyupora no Aru Machi), in which a spunky girl struggles to rise above her rough, factory town environment. That is to say, Lee and co-scriptwriter Habara Daisuke blend straight-up melodrama and social commentary into their pop entertainment mix, like a frothy pineapple drink, spiked with a jolt of eye-tearing Japanese shochu. This mix doesn't always go down easily, but the ending bursts with the sexual dynamism and exuberance of hula - Japanized, yes, but not the sweetened for the tourist trade.
Based on a true story, the film begins in a setting as far removed from Waikiki as could be imagined: a dreary coal-mining town called Joban that in 1965, is in a sharp decline the town fathers are trying desperately to reverse. One of them, the fluttery, bumbling but determined Yoshimoto (Kishibe Ittoku), wants to build a Hawaiian Center as a tourist magnet, with hula performed by local lasses. He hires one Hirayama Madoka (Matsuyuki Yasuko), professional dancer from Tokyo as a hula teacher. Wearing a white sheath dress and big shades, she arrives looking Mod, bored and out of place.
To many of the local folk, particularly the no-nonsense Chiyo (Fuji Sumiko), the whole idea is an affront to community tradition and mores. Also when the local girls realize that hula involves shaking their hips and exposing their midriffs, they take flight. The only survivors are the stage-struck Sanae (Tokunaga Eri), her reluctant pal Kimiko (Aoi Yu), the geeky Shoko (Ikezu Shoko) and the big, lumbering Sayuri (Yamazaki Shizuyo).
The girls are predictably hopeless and Madoka barely goes through the motions of teaching them, while drinking and smoking herself into oblivion. But when the feisty Kimiko rebels, Madoka feels a stirring of ambition. She will turn this motley crew into hula dancers if it kills them.
Meanwhile, she has some lessons of her own to learn about local pride, taught by a drunken Yoshimoto and Kimiko’s scapegrace, but good-hearted brother Yojiro (Toyokawa Etsushi), who becomes Madoka and Kimiko’s defender against the wrath of his mother, the aforementioned Chiyo. Finally, the girls who had first fled return - and Madoka has the rough makings of a dance troupe.
This is same basic pattern as Yaguchi Shinobu’s 2004 hit Swing Girls, but where Yaguchi kept the tone consistently bubbly and light, Lee ladles on the dramatic complications, from the usual one of parental opposition to setbacks and disasters that reflect the hardscrabble realities of life in mid-1960s rural Japan.
In its last act, the film comes triumphantly to life as the girls strut their stuff, particularly Aoi Yu in a bring-down-the-house hula solo, with Lee's camera capturing every erotically explosive moment. Forget Honolulu - Joban, here I come.