It’s not exactly arcane wisdom – though Hollywood’s affinity for them might make it seem so – but remakes are almost always a bad idea. Remakes of foreign films are even less often successful and remakes of good foreign films are an invitation to divine punishment.

Yet they go on remaking them. The latest example is Peter Chelsom’s version of Masayuki Suo’s wonderful Japanese film “Shall We Dance?” of 1996. Mr. Chelsom (“Hear My Song,” “Funny Bones,” “The Mighty”) appears to have taken the precaution of getting Mr. Suo himself as co-adaptor of his own original screenplay. It still doesn’t work.

The reasons are largely cultural. That is why, I take it, Mr. Suo has been induced to write a little message at the head of the press notes, saying: “I was delighted that the remake so successfully addressed the same issues faced by the characters in my film. … Seeing the remake reconfirmed to me that these are universal themes which confirm our commonality and surpass cultural differences.”

Well, up to a point. The trouble is that the original depended far more than he suggests here on the Japanese cultural context, in which public touching between the sexes and ballroom-style dancing is therefore still faintly indecent. That is the reason that his salary man hero keeps his dance lessons hidden from his wife.

In Mr. Chelsom’s version, the Chicago lawyer John Clark (Richard Gere) has no such reason for secrecy, yet he keeps his dancing a secret anyway. It is hinted that he was originally attracted sexually to Paulina (Jennifer Lopez), the beautiful dance teacher he glimpsed at the window of her studio from his commuter train – but that he sublimated those feelings by falling in love with the dancing. This is not enough to explain his continuing to keep the secret from his wife (Susan Sarandon), with whom he otherwise appears to have a close and loving relationship.

She hires a detective (Richard Jenkins) to follow him and is amazed – as well she might be – to find that he is going dancing instead of having an affair. She has no more insight than the audience as to why he would do it secretly. When their daughter suggests that dad should teach mom to dance, too, instead of skulking off on his own every Wednesday night, the idea is treated as an epiphany. Gosh! Who’d ever have thought of that?

Likewise, when finally called upon to give an account of himself, all he can say to explain his behavior is: “I felt ashamed for wanting to be happier when we have so much.”

Huh? Is it imaginable that anybody, I mean any real person, could ever utter such a sentence as an excuse for taking dancing lessons? I don’t think so. That a Chicago lawyer specializing in wills and trusts should see a few dance lessons as adding more than he deserved to his sum of worldly happiness is just ludicrous.

It’s true that many moviegoers will be happy to treat all such objections as minor irritations. All right, they will say, so the motivations of the characters are a little obscure, even silly. There are still a lot of things to like about the film.

And they are right. The dancing scenes are enjoyable to watch and at times thrilling, and there are several well-drawn characters, especially Link (Stanley Tucci), a colleague from Clark’s law office who also keeps his dancing a secret but has a better reason for doing so, in that he is already a source of amusement in the office. Bobbie (Lisa Ann Walter) is a feisty dame who rather terrifies the men around her but ends up in the big competition as partner to both Clark and Link.

Ms. Sarandon is always watchable, too, but I’m afraid that Miss Lopez’s broken blossom, the dance champion who has been nursing a broken heart ever since splitting up with her longtime partner, falls flat as a character, if not as a dancer. There is some attempt to bring her sad personal history to bear on her teaching of the tango, which she describes as “the vertical expression of a horizontal wish.”

At the conclusion of the dance, the partner is meant to feel “like she has ruined you for life,” but this only reminds us of the theatricality with which she has been acting out her own ruin. And of course this doesn’t last. It’s like one of those “lifetime bans” in football that last about three weeks.

The forced uplift also comes into play when Miss Mitzi, the dance studio’s proprietor (Anita Gillette), appears to give up nipping at her little silver flask after each dance, perhaps because she’s been cured of alcoholism by John’s inspirational dancing. Such moments bring us back to what I take to be the fakery of the central situation: Mr. Chelsom has made the classic Hollywood mistake of putting his uplift before the basic mise-en-scene that is meant to create it.

In a way, this is understandable, because Mr. Suo’s original was done with such a light touch that it seemed almost to have conjured its effects out of thin air. But a closer look would have shown that he also did the hard work of making us believe in the relationship between the secret dancer and his wife. That is the task that proves too much for the remake.