Movie review: Memoirs of a Geisha

From now on, I will scale my movie/dvd reviews out of 10 due to issues raised by my sister when discussing this movie, because its not a bad movie...but its nowhere near good either. For a movie that is a memoir of a character/profession whose most obvious trait is their visual appearance, I suppose it's fitting that it is the visual aspect of the movie that works best.

Memoirs is an adaptation of the 1997 novel by Arther Golden. Chiyo is the daughter of a fisherman and his sick wife. One day, she and her older sister are sold to an agent who takes them to Kyoto and sells Chiyo to an okiya (a kind of boarding house for geisha that also supplies kimonos etc), while the sister is sold to a brothel. The movie follows Chiyo through her loneliness and training, her attempts to run away from the okiya, her *rescue* by The Chairman, her transformation into Sayuri and triumphant rise to become the top geisha in Kyoto, WWII, and finally true love.

If that plot synopsis sounds cliched, that's because this movie was chock-full of cliches. The movie faithfully replicates the book and Chiyo/Sayuri's *fairytale* existence. The stock characters are all there - the Cinderella-esque heroine(Chiyo/Sayuri), the evil Stepmother (head of the okiya) and Stepsister (Hatsumomo - Gong Li, left), the fairy godmother (Mameha), and the Prince (The Chairman) and his less handsome and therefore unworthy brother (Nobu). It's such a pity that the filmmakers saw fit to make the film almost three hours long because the thing that made the book so rivetting was not the storyline, it was the minutiae - the details of geisha training, dress and makeup, conversation etc, which meant that for two thirds of the movie, my friends and I were muttering to each other that the film could have done with some judicious editing. And then the appearance of the various geisha didn't even have true geisha hairstyles and make up so, meh.

The most frustrating aspect of the film though would have to be the fact that the film was in english. Correction, heavily accented english. I'm aware that the cast consisted of a mixed bag of asian races, predominantly Chinese-background, and therefore it would have been nigh on impossible to stage in japanese. But having it in english only served to highlight the cliches of the plot and render the overwrought script into outright hilarity for me. For days after watching this, I'd say Zhang Ziyi's line: I WAN' DA LIE-YF DAT IZ MINE! and then burst into laughter. Lydia and Andrea found the speaking completely annoying after a few minutes, while Akina (who is Japanese) found it absolutely bizarre to watch the Japanese actors speaking english badly and knowing they act a helluva lot better in their native language.

The movie's real saving grace in my opinion were the visuals, which were quite lovely, and the absolute powerhouse performance by the beautiful Gong Li as the evil Hatsumomo. While you're never given a reason as to why she's such a bitch (regret at having to sacrifice her life and chances of love for other people's livelihoods? Fear of Sayuri becoming the dominant geisha in Gion?), I found that without their rivalry to drive Sayuri into becoming a better geisha, the movie just became quite *blah* and boils down to Sayuri wanting to impress The Chairman.

Which then brings me to this - does no one else find the idea of what The Chairman did as completely creepy? A 30/40-something year old man finds a crying girl on a bridge, compares her to his children, and then asks Mameha to find this girl and train her to become a geisha so that he can have her around later? Does this not stink to anyone else of paedophile *grooming*? Yeuch!!!

I must also talk about the crazy dance scene (below). While visually...er...*interesting*, as a dance performed by geisha in pre-war Japan...I'll give Akina's generous assessment that it was "awfully modern...very now" but to me it looked like the spasms of an epileptic grand mal seizure.

Part of the problem of grading this movie was that as an adaptation, it worked a little too well as the flaws of the book became more obvious flaws in the movie. A book written by a man from the female viewpoint of a world he has never lived in becomes a movie about an exotic asian environment and (to an extent) lifestyle for an english-speaking audience. The movie tries to be deep in the way the book tried to be deep, and like the book, it fails at its aim. And yet its not a completely pathetic load of crap the way Troy sucked to hell. It tried hard and did well given what it worked from, but there were too many flaws for me to give it a passing mark.

4/10