Memoirs of a Geisha (2005, USA)

To be perfectly honest, the only two things that drew me to Memoirs of a Geisha were a) Koji Yakusho, and b) boredom. I had serious problems with Arthur Golden’s novel, particularly its Oprah Book Club-style narrative (everything bad that can happen, will) and highly problematic romance. However, it did have a stunning sense of period detail and style, which made reading about such a secretive subculture intriguing in an anthropological sense.

Unfortunately, the movie version of Memoirs wastes this aspect of the book in favor of the aforementioned romance and endlessly bitchy interactions between warring geisha. It’s a bore to watch, really, and that it clocks in at over two hours doesn’t help. Yakusho is entirely wasted in the thankless supporting role of Ken Watanabe’s right-hand-man. The ladies don’t fare much better – while Gong Li seems to be having a good time playing the most evil geisha imaginable, Michelle Yeoh fares far worse as the near-saintly mother hen who takes Ziyi Zhang’s little lost sparrow under her wing. Zhang, though gorgeous, is lightweight as the centerpiece of the narrative. And in setting up the romance between her character and Watanabe's, the filmmakers make the affair even less appetizing than Golden did – the visual component of seeing a eleven-year-old girl fall in “love” with a forty-five-year-old man is extremely off-putting, especially considering all that she endures in her subsequent years of geisha training, all in the name of getting her man.

I can’t help but mention my issues with the casting – the men are played by Japanese actors, but save for the “ugly” geisha, all of the central actresses are Chinese. Nothing against this lovely-looking cast, but it strikes me as extremely xenophobic for an American studio to make a movie about a pivotal time/place in Japanese culture and stock it full of Chinese actors. Not that Memoirs would necessarily have been improved by an “authentic” cast – what’s broken here couldn’t be fixed that easily – but the move smacks of such a romantically Western sense of Asia that it’s no wonder that ethnic identity is easily glossed over.