Word: mais
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...Ruggiero spoke, negotiators from the world's developed countries were working feverishly to complete the MAI by a deadline set for this month. But they will almost certainly miss that deadline, in no small part because of the kind of activism on display in San Jose. The charge that the MAI would eviscerate national environmental protections has turned a technical economic agreement into a cause celebre. And that says a lot about the way the debate over free trade has transformed the American environmental movement...
This week, Harvard students are donning their winter coats and trudging out to the Square under umbrellas to buy sun block and swimsuits. On the eve of Spring Break, many are looking forward to mai-tais instead of midterms...
Moved by an impulse he scarcely understands, he decides to take dancing lessons from an older instructor, while secretly eyeing the lovely and distant Mai (Tamiyo Kusakari, whose long-lined elegance suggests a Japanese Audrey Hepburn). A former competitive ballroom dancer and less-than-enthusiastic teacher, she rebuffs his shy initial advances, telling him plainly that he'd better not dance if it's her she's after. Piqued, he throws his best efforts into proving that he does want to dance, and ultimately makes the lie true. The dancing gets into his blood, providing him both release and fulfillment...
...central characters, Sugiyama and Mai, who lend the movie its grace, subtlety and essential dignity. Her aloofness and his reticence makes their first real moment of communion surprisingly affecting, despite the too-pat neatness of its timing. There's a tender believability to their relationship that is far more convincing than a conventional romance would have been. It helps smooth over the unavoidable awkwardness of how to treat the wife, who begins by evoking sympathy and ends up offering it--not without a hitch. Sugiyama can't escape his loneliness without transferring some of it to her; one hopes...
...character of Japanese society--the sheer unthinkableness of any but a purely platonic affair between two such protagonists--is perfectly exemplified in the Japanese attitude towards dancing, still looked at askance and rather suspiciously as a somewhat unseemly public demonstration. Sugiyama's victory is not that he wins Mai (though, in a sense, he does) but that he transcends these barriers and gains something even more precious: the pure joy of dancing and a taste of freedom and exhilaration that has eluded him in all the other aspects of his strictly-conventional life...