above: Suzuka Ohgo as Chiyo
As part of my stress test to watch all the movies I formally vowed never to watch, I proceded to Memoirs of A Geisha.
Oh dear. Where to begin? I watched the movie, all of the DVD extras on Disk 2, I read the opposing Amazon reviews, and also the original Arthur Golden book. Since every like/dislike under the sun seem already to have been voiced here, I will stay away from repeating and becoming a statistic.
Three things you should know before you begin criticizing this movie. 1) The creators repeated several times in the DVD Extra Disk 2 that their movie is an impression, not a documentary. 2)This is an American movie made in Hollywood. 3) This is a movie based on a book written by a Caucasian writer based on his interviews with a geishas, one of which was Iwasaki Mineko, who went on to write her own account called A Life (because she felt Golden had twisted the real story too much).
Ok. Item 1. I found the DVD Disk 2 more entertaining than the movie itself, because it put the movie next to historical archives. It was the creators’ way, I felt, of giving the actual historical facts some airtime. Watching DVD Disk 2 will help straighten out many of the arguments presented here in the Amazon reviews. The creators of MOAG did consult Liza Dalby, an author herself of several books on Geishas and Japanese kimonos. So if they wanted to, they could have devoted a large percentage of their resources towards getting the historical details fairly accurate. However, the creators stressed several times that MOAG was an impression, not a documentary. This impressionistic license means that the architecture, the kimonos, the Geisha life, dance, routine, hair, makeup are all based loosely on the actual facts. The set designer (a Hollywood set designer) went to Japan for a few weeks and distilled a little bit from one building, and some more from another, and threw it all together in a (con)fusion of anachronistic and cross-cultural impressionistic town sitting in the backlot of a California town. The costume maker, another non-Japanese who does not specialize in kimonos, did some research and started churning out a kimono every few weeks (where the real one takes a year and cost what an average Japanese man might make working full time for a year). Rob Marshall, the director of Chicago (and dancer/choreographer by profession) jazzes up the Geisha dance routine, requests that his version of the Geisha is presented as “supermodels of their day.” The silhouette of MOAG’s geishas are almost wasp-waisted, where the actual Geishas of that time emphasized cylindrical form in their kimono profile.
Japanophiles and Japanese people will undoubtedly scream murder, and they have the right to. However, if you keep in mind that MOAG is the product of the Western imagination, you will be able to watch the movie as entertainment. It would have been nice if they got the details spot on, but I doubt it will make the mainstream audience love it more.
Item 2. This is an American movie made in Hollywood, produced by Steven Spielberg. People who have watched Wim Wenders’s documentary Room 666 (where famous directors are asked about the future of cinema) will remember a long list of non-American directors carrying on about technology, craft, and the art of moviemaking, only to be followed by Spielberg, who sounded like an accountant whose primary concern was the bottom line. He talked about financing, funds, box office returns, and then he talked some more about money. Nothing wrong with that, but it explains the decisions they made for MOAG. You could make a movie with authentic Japanese actors speaking Japanese, with Shakuhachi, koto, and shamisen laden soundtrack, and get consultation from everyone from the Learning Channel to the History Channel. But on oepning night, the cinema will have only a handful of seats occupied by stuffy academics and bookworms. Instead, take John Williams’s music, throw in Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, then use all the biggest recognizable Asian actors in America, make it pretty, and pace it for American consumption. What do you get? Academy awards, money in the bank, and most importantly, thousands of people with newly whetted appetites who want to learn more about Japanese culture. The ones who have the consicentiousness to research further, will eventually obtain the accurate details anyway.
I’m not saying I understand this approach, but I do understand that this is an American movie made for American consumption.
Item 3. This movie is based on a book written by a Caucasian writer. Epistemologically speaking, this movie is already three steps removed from fact, if you count Mineko’s self-editing in re-telling her story. There’s also the case of Mineko who did not speak English as a first language, and Golden who did not speak Japanese as a first language. There’s a wide chasm between transmission and perception even by the time the story reaches book form. Art is not always obligated to truth. And the history of art has always been driven by what each interpreted work (in each artist’s reiteration of the fashionable themes of his or her day) revealed about the interpreter and not the interpreted. If Marshall is a choreographer, then it is only logical that he speaks in a medium he is most familiar with, dance.
Though quality is not being questioned here, I am reminded of digital photography’s golden rule: if you don’t begin with the best original picture, subsequent edits can only go downhill from there. Both Golden and Rob Marshall never pretended they know what goes on in the pure Japanese consciousness when they dispatch their respective versions of MOAG. What I know of Japanese consciousness comes from zen koans, kimonos, the art of Ike no Taiga and Tawaraya Sotatsu, but I can tell you Memoirs of a Geisha has very little evidence of it.
With all that said, I thought the movie was watchable, and it was not slow. People who complained about Zhang Ziyi’s acting may want to be reminded of the Japanese classical tradition of Noh, where masks are worn during the performance, and facial expressions hidden. Combined this with the Japanese tendency to subtlety and hidden connotations, and you begin to realize maybe restraint was an intention, and expecting her to act like Lindsay Lohan may be slightly ethnocentric. Michelle Yeoh does a good job being the stately mentor to Sayuri, but her curiously orange hair did raise my eyebrows. I think the opening of the movie left out an important part of the book. We don’t really know the reasons why Tanaka sold the two little girls to the okiya. In the book, we know that their parents were very poor and they lived in a country fishing village. The father was barely making ends meet, and the mother was dying. It could be proposed that the parents agreed to their girls being sold off because that was, by comparison, a better life than that which they could barely offer. If you begin on this premise, then it gives you a very different perception of what it meant to be a geisha, even though geishas are correctly depicted as people who did not have a choice.
The movie is paced better than the book, and it made a story (that is already geared for public consumption) move right along. However, there were dozens of times where I found myself saying “gosh, if I hadn’t read the book, I could not make the leap from the previous scene to this one.” For example, we see Hatsumomo finding Sayuri’s face on a poster. All that is left out includes the detail that Mameha’s meteoric rise to fame came from her appearance on a poster for a celebrated annual festival. In the book, Mameha choreographed a very Japanese “dance” where Sayuri goes to the poster artist’s disheveled studio and hangs out until the “suggestion” is “introduced” to him that he has a brilliant idea of using Sayuri for a model. These low-key transactions are what reminds me of traditional Asian (and Japanese) etiquette.
For the purpose of the movie though, I guess it was enough to tell what it needed to tell.
So if you can suspend your allegiance to factual and historical details for two hours, then it’s entertainment in the form we recognize it to be. Suzuka Ohgo as the young Chiyo is absolutely adorable, and the movie is a good (but light) exposure for some of the biggest Chinese actresses working today. Gong Li’s Hatsumomo translates onscreen better than it did in the novel, as her character, like Golden’s story, is really about the passing of time. Watch the dvd extra on Disk 2 to round up your Hollywood intro to Geishas. If you want to go deeper and enter the actual Japanese world of storytelling, one can start with Mizoguchi, Kurosawa, and Ozu. There is also a whole pantheon of Japanese films that never make it to the US. Film lovers owe it to themselves to explore the birthplace of Clint Eastwood westerns, Star Wars, and some of Jacques Rivette’s most memorable masterpieces.
