Shall We Dance?

Masayuki Suo (周防 正行 Suo Masayuki?, born October 29, 1956 in Tokyo) is a Japanese film director. He is perhaps best known for his two Japan Academy Prize-winning films, 1992’s Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t and 1996’s Shall We Dance?.

In 1982, along with filmmakers Yoshiho Fukuoka, Itsumichi Isomura, Toshiyuki Mizutani and Akira Yoneda, Suo founded a production company called Unit 5. Suo worked as an assistant director and appeared in the cast of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s directorial debut, the pinku eiga Kanda River Pervert War (1983). At this early stage in his career, Suo also wrote scripts for the pink genre, such as Scanty Panty Doll: Pungent Aroma (1983). Suo first film as director was also in the pinku eiga genre: Abnormal Family (1984), a film designed as a tribute and satire of Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story.In his book on the pinku eiga, Behind the Pink Curtain (2008), Jasper Sharp calls Abnormal Family an early masterpiece, and one of the wittiest films ever made in the genre. Suo not only pokes gentle fun at Ozu’s story, but also mimics many of his stylistic techniques, such as shooting his actors from a low, tatami-mat angle, stiff and static characters speaking to each other with mis-matched eye-angles, and a simple, sentimental melody which accompanies the film. In the years since its release, the film has amused film students with the activity of locating and identifying Suo’s many nods to Ozu and his oeuvre. Abnormal Family was Suo’s only directorial work in the pink genre.

He next worked for Jūzō Itami, to film “making of” pieces for that director’s A Taxing Woman (1987) and A Taxing Woman 2 (1988). He made his regular feature film debut with Fancy Dance in 1989, and won the Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award for his next feature, Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t, in 1991.As of 2007, his most recent film is the 2006 drama I Just Didn’t Do It. —Wikipedia