Cha-Cha

The rom-com sways far off into LOCO territory 3 steps at a time with a neo-Nipponese twist…

Do you like cha-cha? More importantly, does Cha-Cha (Marika Itō of Nogizaka46, It’s a Summer Film!) like you? That’s what everyone at the design office wants from the mysterious new girl who shakes things up like a cha-cha. While Cha-Cha is actually more or less just a freelance illustrator for books, she stays the talk of the office: admiringly for males, enviously for females. That’s especially the case for co-worker Rin (Sawako Fujima, 90 Years Old-So What?) who’s feeling the most seething resentment of all (loath as she ever is to look like it) at the boss’ shameless favoritism towards Cha-Cha that shows everywhere, from the sweet unbossly tone he keeps speaking to her with to the lenience and leeway he leaves her with for tasks (in addition to his selecting her at all for them).

She’ll need it: She’s clumsy, she’s rambling, she’s capricious, she’s creepy joking (?!) about her blood fetish, and by any objectively quantifiable beauty calculations, she doesn’t even look that good! It’s more that she acts a lot more kawaii than she actually is — but that’s so kawaii. And it’s the fashion in which she fashions her fashion that’s fashionable rather than the fashion itself (or anything of that fashion). She’s feline to the point she’s indeed often likened to cats whether complimentarily or disparagingly (which is beside the point once attaining the ability to be likened to a cat). It all miscalculatedly adds up to an irresistibly vivacious sylph of a quasi-OL. Meanwhile, on a floor below them, restaurant worker Raku (Taishi Nakagawa, Bushido — once again playing a berated peon no matter what time period he’s in) tries his boss’ patience with his more relaxed clumsiness. Upon Cha-Cha’s not particularly dramatic Meet Kawaii with Raku — who’s unimpressed by her impressive lack of inhibition but curious about it — her whole world is threatened to be turned straight and steady.

Cha-Cha — whose name is quite possibly just a nickname for Cha-Cha-Cha — has barely even gotten to know Raku up to this point (and hardly even spends much of what time she has known him getting to know him as opposed to rambling and mucking about). Yet the two have an unexplainable/not wanting to be bothered finding an explanation for affinity, to the point that CC quickly moves in with him. It’s not that CC is that kind of girl; it’s that she’s that kind of cat (like almost any other cat that will make herself at home as long as the occupant doesn’t scare her). Meanwhile, on a floor above them, the herbaceously warm Peony (Stefanie Arianne, Plan 75), who heads an English tutoring school, is in something of a reverse of Cha-Cha’s situation. Her drifting, needy, NEETy boyfriend Mamoru (Akihisa Shiono, Use the Eyeballs!) had already moved in with her a good while ago despite all the allegations of stuff he may be doing with other women and stuff he may be doing for illegal kicks.

What might these two couples have to do with each other besides the dually flimsy foundations of their relationships? Absolutely nothing, lets hope…

To be frank, romantic comedies are near the very bottom of the cinematic food chain among major genres for the author of this review — sharing space around others that are most prone to formula and frivolity and least prone to aiming for any kind of social significance or cinematic creativity such as popular sports movies (except boxing) and Hollywood blockbusters/those trying to copy them. There are occasional ones with dramatically different scenarios or verve, but when in their pure formulaic form there’s little worse imaginable. (Therefore, the only times he’s likely to be found near them are rare instances when “dragged” by no personal initiative — and even then won’t go without a fight.) So then, what brings him to what’s so clearly labeled, advertised and proudly brandished as a bubbly romantic comedy whose plot the makers themselves barely seemed to know much about?

Well, first of all, Cha-Cha happens to be the latest project under “(not) Heroine Movies,” a quasi-franchise of female-focused films of unorthodox nature headed by fresh new filmmakers and stars. What’s only their 4th film can’t help but warrant a chance for having accidentally followed them from the first project (that I only just learned was them), Takuya Kato’s Grown-Ups (2022); and even better yet since the last production seen from the project was Shinya Tamada’s I Am What I Am (2023), which not only had social significance and cinematic creativity to spare, but happened to be the best film of the year by that personal estimation. Nevertheless, ranging from its unashamed silliness to its reinforced jaunty jollity to its effervescent lead (beyond the soda fixation), Cha-Cha is from the sound of it as well as by all appearances the polar opposite in style and nature of what I Am What Am was.

For the record, the last project of co-producer Kosuke Muroi had strong similarity in also being about an insurmountably freewheeling, free-thinking woman in the excellent Yoko (2023); only now making a world of difference in exchanging the ultimate introvert for the ultimate extrovert. Quirky is the best, most widely base-covering word to describe Cha-Cha, whether one is talking about the titular [not] heroine or anything else in it. In its indomitable insouciance, freewheeling eccentricity, and occasionally outright neurotic tendencies, Cha-Cha’s dish has something of the flavour of Licorice Pizza (2021) but hardly the same overall taste, as this is a more decidedly Japanese, senses-numbingly bittersweet umeboshi pizza. For another rom-com non-aficionado selling point, there’s deceptive resourcefulness in director Mai Sakai’s accompanying script, squeezing cleverly meaningful/amusing dialogue and ideas out of limited, airy or even asinine situations.

Love is finally exposed as that most self-indulgently selfish of self-aggrandisers: Its final goal and primarily motivation — for women at least — is simply to be recognised, entitled and humoured as more important than everyone and everything else by the one[s] they build up the most emotional dependence (further commodified as emotional investment) around. For men that tends to be of at most far less importance than the more nakedly, less deceptively selfish concrete aim of simply attaining the one[s] they find better than everyone else (or at least anyone else attainable) by their more physical, practical specifications. So in a miraculously rare instance when an acutely prudent women and man are actually able to see through each other like that all without minding the implications, could that result in the ultimate true understanding between partners?

Raku stares at and channels the moon; Cha-Cha stares at and channels BL — are their tidal forces gravitationally aligned?

Through the film’s intermissions, the narrative finds itself delighted when Cha-Cha’s voiceovers about what men find in her and their more general motivations are later corroborated by Raku’s own voiceovers to the point of easing its own trepidation of mood. The lead couple’s combustible confidence in nonchalant love also flows through the directorial style, so that so much as getting a bottle of soda justifies taking a quick succession of different camera angles centered around it (not to mention the deliberately, aptly frothy speech) to reflect the changes in mood. That’s because it’s not about the soda itself, but that someone would still buy it for a lady when she had an inscrutable and unreasonable demand for it only to miss the most intimate intimations intended from it.

Cha-Cha’s music plays a key role in supporting, shaping, sweetening and souring the story. With lively evocations jumping from germanely distorted J-idol pop and indie rock to bouncy jazz and even fairytale music, the soundtrack is among the strongest and most memorable elements befitting of the title even if the eponymous genre never actually shows up. [Well, sort of — “cha-cha” formally works as a truncation of “cha-cha-cha” like that in Japanese and English, but in Spanish “chacha” actually means “housemaid” which Cha-Cha well, doesn’t exactly fit the bill for. But that’s another story…]

Speaking of other stories, do not fault the reviewer for tangents, por favor, as Cha-Cha much like Cha-Cha wholeheartedly embraces the “lost” art of the unstable tangent. The story — even when its treatment stays whimsical all through — veers towards the forms of everything from thrillers to fantasy movies to even horror, while always leaving the guess factor deliciously open as to which ones it is merely teasing and which ones it may fully dive into (then on top of that, which ones it could even sink in to the point of no return). Add to that carefully considered commentary on what it means to be a hero (on a rom-com where they’re neither needed nor asked for) and just how low the (for Cha-Cha at least) thankfully lowered bare minimum for being a heroine lay.

Background aside, by the end of proceedings and regressions, it’s hard to argue the filmmakers didn’t know what they were doing in casting the star. It would be misleading to say that Itō owns the character, as the character owns her. Cha-Cha is the distinctly Japanese embodiment of everything Japanese aspire not to be but still wish for the results of — maybe in that regard she’s actually just the warped reincarnation of Lady Chacha aka Yodogimi (see Shinobi no Mono 3: Resurrection).

Nakagawa through his performance, on the other hand, carries all the dignified mediocrity (maybe with a hint of discontentment) Japanese can feel safe wanting to emulate no matter how much better a position they be be in. As such, they’re not supposed to have good chemistry: their well-performed half-hearted search for it is the crux of the story. The dangling protuberance of the story meanwhile is well supported by Fujima (who actually came up from just doing tokusatsu) and more prominently Filipina Arianne, whose jocular, [too] carefree [for her own good] role is a 180-degree turn from the melancholic Melancholic (2019), Plan 75 (2022) and Blue Imagine (2024) comprising the rest of her career.

Swaying to her own rhythm with an enchantingly offbeat beat, Cha-Cha — the movie and the maiden — has the makings of a candy cult favourite. Some may find it gets a little too goofy in places. Others still may dwell on the opposite conclusion it gets a little too icky; not saccharine icky as unwaveringly as it stays outwardly looking and acting that way, but iya! icky or ¡caramba! icky for a genre that’s supposed to be cheerful innocuous fun. But anyone with a lot less an idea of what anything or anyone is supposed to be like has likely stumbled into the right dance.

“Who do you prefer? A hero of justice or a villain?”

“I’m inclined to be infatuated with villains… a hero of justice sacrifices you to save the world. But a villain saves you by sacrificing the world. That sounded cool.”

“Hmm. I see.”

“However, that means if the villain doesn’t actually choose you, you end up as one among the sacrificed, doesn’t it? So I later realised that only the one who’s selected can utter such words.”

Cha-Cha screened as part of JAPAN CUTS 2024.

Las notas de chachachá:

Whether one likes it, dislikes it or doesn’t feel either way about it, the simple reality of the modern Japanese film industry is that the idol industry as now overwhelmingly represented by idol tycoon Yasushi Akimoto is inextricably linked to it. AKB48 with all of their (many, many, many) members past and present and all of their (many, many) spinoff/related groups now comprise the largest pool of ingoing actresses — dominating on a scale about as great as Miss Hong Kong followed by smaller pageants did for Golden Age Hong Kong actresses. Probably the most well-known and established of them all is Atsuko Maeda (To the Ends of the Earth; Baby Assassins Nice Days) ahead of several others from AKB48 like Mariko Shinoda (Tag) over the years. But another huge subcategory hails from the “48” groups’ “rival” Sakamichi series of “46” groups (named after streets instead of districts) led by Nogizaka46 including Nanase Nishino (Last of the Wolves) and Marika Itō here.

Then there are additional degrees of offshoots (or offshoot offshoots) like those from the sister groups of rival groups like NZ46 (rival of AKB48) including Sakaurazaka46 girl Yurina Hirate (The Fable: The Killer Who Doesn’t Kill). Director Mai Sakai herself had already worked with a former NZ46 girl, Rena Matsui (Bento Harassment), on her early feature Opening Night (2017). For the record, I’m far from an expert on the enterprise (or maybe “empire”) and can only be amazed by anyone able and willing to keep up with even significant fractions of the literally hundreds of members of AKB48 alone or several hundreds more from the dozens (?) of connected groups over the years. In fact, I learned who all of the aforementioned except for Maeda (the phenomenon’s first figurehead) were only after seeing their movies and reading the connections from there. That said, the fact I even know that much about the scale and sway of their presence in the industry is only proof that I probably don’t even know the half!