Summary
10 Dance has a bit of arrestingly sweaty energy to it, but it’s mostly a very tame, very talkative, and very underwhelming romance movie.
I will concede that I’m not in the target audience for 10 Dance, a Netflix film from Keishi Otomo, adapting the BL (boys’ love) manga by Inouesatoh. I’d still make the argument it isn’t very good, though, and not just in a “not for me” way. On the contrary, at one point early on, I unexpectedly “got it” in a way that made me lightly question my sexuality, but that turns out to be the most effective moment in a surprisingly chaste movie that doesn’t really excel as either a romantic drama or a dance flick.
Yeah, we’re dancing. But this isn’t Step Up; it takes itself much more seriously than that. It’s a movie about clashing cultures and classism and closeted dudes discovering some things about themselves that even they’re a little surprised by. The dancing isn’t really the point, but more of an avenue for exploring attraction in general and these micro-conflicts specifically.
You can see it in the premise. The prestigious competition of the title is the dance world’s equivalent of a sort of Iron Man triathlon, an extreme endurance event in which dancers compete directly across ten distinct styles. Japan’s reigning Latin dance champion, Shinya Suzuki (Ryoma Takeuchi), has about half of those styles sewn up, but to complete the set, he’ll need tutelage from ballroom expert Shinya Sugiki (Keita Machida), and vice versa. The boys are going head-to-head while also helping to prepare each other for victory.
The dance styles are used as lifestyle stand-ins. Ballroom is very sophisticated and classy, so Sugiki introduces Suzuki to fine dining and exquisite tailoring. Latin is deeply sexy and more impulsive, so Suzuki introduces Sugiki to Cuban bars and wearing buttoned shirts very loosely. It’s all a learning curve. But what’s being learned is that both men are very attracted to each other, which is certain to get in the way of the dancing.
That moment I referenced at the top finds Suzuki giving a brief topless primer on the basics of Latin movement, and it’s an impressive display of lightly sweaty physical acting and understated sexual tension that I wish the rest of 10 Dance could have lived up to. Alas, though, that scene feels like a transplant from a different movie, with Takeuchi’s surprising physicality – you’d think he was a dancer-turned-actor, not the other way around – largely playing second-fiddle to his anime haircut and overwrought narration.
The voice-overs speak to a general sense of artlessness that hamstrings a lot of this movie. The script is keen to explain at considerable length what various forms of ballroom dance mean in terms of their artistic expression, but the whole thing’s strangely reluctant to let the dancing do the talking. There are choreographed routines, but they feel edited within an inch of their lives, and clearly aren’t the focal point.
But in the absence of this, 10 Dance is left to be a steamy romance story, and it stumbles here, too. The vitality that Takeuchi exudes in that early tutorial scene is never really recaptured, and the fact that there’s really no valve to let off the built-up steam gives the movie a frustrating quality. The possibility of a compelling will-they-won’t-they angle is undercut by the fact that they obviously will, and indeed do pretty early on in the two-hour runtime, so everything from that point feels a bit like going through the motions.
It’s fine enough. It isn’t an especially handsome production – it looks, to use a reductive term, like a streaming movie – but it certainly isn’t a hideous one, and both leads are capable enough physical performers to sell the dance sequences, scant though they may be. But anyone expecting a big payoff either romantically or physically will leave disappointed, and the efforts to satisfy both aspects just feel like the whole thing is being spread too thin. Maybe there’ll be a more risqué sequel that makes good on all the build-up. As things stand, 10 Dance is a few silky steps shy of a full routine.
