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Based on the best-selling
novel by Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha is set in pre-World War II Japan
and relates the tale of how a poor young girl from a fishing village became the most
renowned geisha in all Kyoto. The film takes a bittersweet, cloyingly nostalgic look at
traditional Japanese society just before rapid modernization and Americanization
transformed it into the international cultural and economic power of today. Golden was
originally inspired by a real-life chance encounter with a man who had been born the
illegitimate son of a prosperous businessman and a geisha, and modeled his protagonist on
an actual geisha, the renowned Mineko Iwasaki.
As the film opens, nine nine-year-old Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo) and
her sister toil away in poverty in their village, but unexpectedly escape
fishing-village life when their parents sell them into domestic slavery. Life at the fishy
end of pre-modern Japan was dreary, wet, and very, very brown—the first half hour of
the film plods and trudges through endless mud and rain, drafty wood huts and fishy-smelly
fingers. The film spends way too much time drawing a picture of how modest young
Chiyo’s means were, so much so that her being sold into slavery comes as a welcome
escape, promising that something more interesting to look at really will come before the
film is over.
Chiyo may be a country bumpkin who smells like fish, but she is clever,
has a sharp tongue, and an incredible grace for recovering from reputation and
career-destroying faux pas. When a strange man buys her a sweet ice during a cherry
blossom festival, she falls in love with this kindly Chairman (Ken Watanabe). In childish
gratitude, she sets as her life’s goal the quest to find this man again and win his
heart for herself one day. With this as her secret goal in life, Chiyo finds herself
mysteriously adopted, in the manner of Dickens’ Pip, but with great expectations of
an altogether sort.
In Kyoto, Chiyo soon finds herself (much like Pygmalion) under the
tutelage of head geisha Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), and well on the road to being transformed
into Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang). As Sayuri, she realizes she is destined to be celebrated one day
as the geisha toast of Kyoto society. Memoirs of a Geisha takes many novelistic
turns of an English variety, as Sayuri learns the devious and wily ways (sexual and
sexual-political) of any good Austen protagonist. She encounters endless skirmishes with
the story’s evil stepmother and step-sisters, the greedy (domestic slave) owner
Granny (Kotoko Kawamura), competitor Hatsumomo (Li Gong), former best friend Pumpkin
(Youki Kudoh), not to mention the unwanted attentions of various businessmen.
Director Rob Marshall offers up cinematic mixed bag--a Hollywood
potboiler which seems to scream Broadway musical rewrite, a stunning homage to the
classical geisha (woman as the perfect and complete aesthetic object), and a rich and
evocative recreation of a now-extinct culture, through a catalog of sumptuous
details--collector-quality kimonos, stage sets recreating traditional old-city Kyoto nooks
and crannies, and more than one show-geisha performance piece. By contrast, the
petty-but-deadly betrayal and foils, and romantic interludes have a hard time not coming
off as soap-operatic.
What seems to be missing from Memoirs of a Geisha is an
authentic Japanese eye and ear. The portrayal of the sharply divided worlds of men and
women often feels more than a little Victorian. Much of the film stresses the meaning and
dire consequences (to the woman) for failing to understand the role of the geisha. She is
never an autonomous woman, but rather a social role and an ornament for a man, an educated
and gracious hostess, never a prostitute. Indeed procuring a buyer for her mizuage
(virginity) (which serves as the film’s crisis and climax) is more akin to landing a
patron or becoming a trophy wife. The problem underlying this film, of viewing Japan
through Hollywood eyes, is tellingly manifested in the casting so many Chinese and
Malaysian actors in Japanese roles (most glaringly Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang in the lead
role).
- Les Wright
