Film Review - Memoirs of a Geisha

Like silk kimonos and cherry blossoms
By: Rianne Hill Soriano

Starring: Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li, Ken Watanabe
Directed by: Rob Marshall
Official Movie site

From Arthur Golden’s international best-seller to an epic spectacle in big screen, Memoirs of a Geisha is a romantic portrait of Japanese culture, particularly of geisha life, in western illustration. Overall, the major characters manage to grab the audience’s eyes for its visual artistry and deeply-felt performances. However, it has commercial compromises. A number of major and supporting roles have been given to Chinese actresses with Ziyi Zhang, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li on the front row. The film has only a few Japanese talents featured for major and supporting roles – with Ken Watanabe as one of the few. Ziyi Zhang is radiant as Sayuri – but just not Japanese. This provides a little less credibility for the film no matter how good the actors and actresses’ performances have been.

The rich material of the novel greatly inspires the epic span of this film into an exotically sumptuous production. The lush interpretation of the lives of painted faces, silk-wrapped and dolled-up women (as if showgirls promoting their artistic skills and culture) reveals a tale of poverty, romance, deceit and dreams. The screen is filled with a great number of lavish and cinematic images that amaze the spectators’ senses. Enjoy the pretty paper lanterns, beautiful silk kimonos, cedar and bamboo buildings and the various displays of artifice. Take pleasure on an orientalist fantasy created by John William’s great original music. From the superb cello solos to the rest of the orchestral masterpieces, the musical score has greatly supported the film's narrative essentials as a western film about an ancient Japanese tradition. However, at a certain point, the too much grandeur of the sprawling sets of old Kyoto and the colorful geisha district becomes straining for the film's content. Everything seems to be beautiful – even the slum areas. It's like director Rob Marshall aims to let the audience enjoy more of the visual spectacle, that at certain times, it already tends to upstage the dirt and the emotions needed for the film. Moreover, some of the framed sets and backgrounds – though in individual terms, they render exquisite and realistic designs in big screen – look very much staged within studios because of the too theatrical movements and unrealistic neatness, coordination and colors. These aesthetics could have been done within the right proportions and combinations that won't seem quite fake.

The drama of the life of an impoverished nine-year-old named Chiyo and the new chapter of her life – from living in a remote fishing village to being sold to a geisha house in Kyoto's Gion district – is like an Asian Cinderella story. It runs to a path of being sentimental that could almost become the likes of a soap opera impressing on its pilot episode. But with its originating novel carefully crafted into a moving saga of identity, beauty, wealth, longing, suffering, politics and power within an ancient Japanese tradition, the film takes advantage of the well-written best-seller to create a dramatic and cinematic storyline.

The story provides both a good source of entertainment and a short glance of what the Japanese society has been before post-war happenings, industrialization and westernization – that have transformed the country into an economic and cultural power of our times.

The story shows a looming view of women in various cultures of the past as in Japan. Women have been portrayed in various cultures as nothing more than delights to the men's eyes and as parts of their desire for asset and power. Issues can be raised in such a story as this as the geishas are admired and savored by men as trophies and source of masculine entertainment and fulfillment.

Suzuka Ohgo plays well as Chiyo. Ziyi Zhang renders a great performance as a well-trained geisha under the mentorship of Mameha (Michelle Yeoh). She justifies the artistic and social skills a geisha exudes more than just having a pancake make-up, a silk kimono and a geisha umbrella. Michelle Yeoh, Li Gong (Hatsumomo) and Youki Kudoh (Pumpkin) have richly developed characters. The supporting males (though they have not been given as much time to develop their characters as the females) Ken Watanabe (the Chairman) and Koji Yakusho (Nobu) still give effective performances. These major and supporting characters contribute to the story's considerable details relating to geisha entertainment and romance in the 1920's period.

This film is visually and aurally spectacular. However it gets emotionally remote at certain scenes. It focuses on the more technical, audio-visual line of storytelling than putting more heart on the love and angst of an oppressed woman and geisha. After all the cinematic showdown of technically commendable shots, it's quite ironic that the ending tries to draw a subtle face from a tragedy. Even the romantic aspect of Sayuri and the Chairman during the height of the story simply yields pretty much the same as the other gorgeous shots of cherry blossoms and silk kimonos.

This epic romance period piece is worth seeing for its audio-visual feast. It is a movie for the ears and the eyes, but not enough for the heart.