European Premiere | Restored Classics | Out Of Competition | Tribute to Lee Sang-Il
Japan, 2006/4K 2025, 121’, Japanese
Directed by: Lee Sang-il
Screenplay: Lee Sang-il, Habara Daisuke
Cinematography (color): Yamamoto Hideo
Editing: Imai Tsuyoshi
Music: Jake Shimabukuro
Producers: Lee Bong-ou, Kawai Hiroshi, Hosono Yoshiaki
Cast: Matsuyuki Yasuko, Toyokawa Etsushi, Aoi Yu, Kishibe Ittoku, Fuji Sumiko, Tokunaga Eri, Ikezu Shoko, Yamazaki Shizuyo
Date of First Release in Territory: September 23rd, 2006
From its title,
Hula Girls would seem to be one of the many Japanese movies about losers who take up minor sports or performing arts (sumo wrestling, ballroom dancing, rowing, synchronized swimming, swing jazz) and find their grooves. These films usually end with a big, rousing finale, in which the protagonists show off their hard-won skills and prove that the waltz, say, is really cool.
Though it generally follows this formula, Lee Sang-il’s
Hula Girls departs from it in ways reminiscent of Urayama Kirio’s 1962 classic
Foundry Town, in which a spunky girl struggles to rise above her rough factory town environment.
That is, Lee and co-scriptwriter Habara Daisuke blend straight melodrama and social commentary into their frothy pop entertainment mix, like a pineapple drink spiked with a jolt of Japanese shochu. This mix doesn’t always go down easily, but the ending bursts with the sexual dynamism and sheer exuberance of hula. Japanized, yes, but not sweetened for the tourist trade.
Based on a true story, the film begins in 1965 in a setting as far removed from Waikiki as could be imagined: the dreary coal-mining town of Iwaki in snowy Fukushima Prefecture. With cheap oil driving down profits from coal, Iwaki is in a sharp decline the town fathers are trying desperately to reverse.
One, the bumbling but determined Yoshimoto (Kishibe Ittoku), proposes to build a Hawaiian Center as a tourist magnet, with hula performed by local dancers. To help them move like the real thing, he hires Hirayama Madoka (Matsuyuki Yasuko), a 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 locals the whole idea is an affront to community traditions and values. Also, when the local girls see 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 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 a stupor. But when the feisty Kimiko rebels against this farce, 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 wayward, good-hearted brother Yojiro (Toyokawa Etsushi). But Yojiro also becomes Kimiko’s defender against the wrath of their conservative mother, Chiyo (Fuji Sumiko). Finally, the girls who had 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 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 hula solo that brings down the house, with Lee’s camera capturing every erotically explosive moment.
Forget Honolulu – Iwaki, here I come.
Lee Sang-il
Lee Sang-il (b. 1974) is a third-generation Zainichi Korean born in Niigata. He studied at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image. Lee achieved mainstream success with Hula Girls (2006), while winning Best Picture and Best Director honors at the Japan Academy Film Awards. His 2013 remake of Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven was a box-office disappointment, but his 2025 Kabuki-centered epic Kokuho became the highest-grossing live-action Japanese film in history, earning over ¥17 billion. He was the recipient of the Akira Kurosawa Award for career achievement at the 2025 Tokyo International Film Festival.
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1999 – Chong
2006 – Hula Girls
2010 – Villain
2013 – Unforgiven
2025 – Kokuho