Memoirs of a Geisha
Written by Robin Swicord
Directed by Rob Marshall
Columbia/DreamWorks SKG
2005
Rating:


A warranted uproar erupted when it was announced that Chinese and Malaysian actresses Ziyi Zhang ("2046"), Michelle Yeoh ("Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon") and Gong Li ("Raise the Red Lantern") would be portraying the Japanese leads in the Hollywood adaptation of Arthur Golden's acclaimed novel "Memoirs of a Geisha." Yet no one objected to "Chicago" director Rob Marshall taking the reins of the film over a Japanese director, or that "Little Women" scribe Robin Swicord adapted the material rather than someone more intimately familiar with the material.

Protestations over the hiring of those behind the camera would have more drastically changed the result of the overripe, inert film adaptation that "Memoirs of a Geisha" has become.

Zhang plays Sayuri, a girl sold into indentured servitude at an okiya ("geisha house") who eventually trains to become a famous geisha with the kindly Mameha (Yeoh). Sayuri hopes that her status as a geisha will be a stepping stone toward becoming a woman worthy enough of the Chairman (Ken Watanabe), a wealthy businessman who showed kindness toward her as a child. Her hopes are frequently dashed by Hatsumomo (Gong in Gina Gershon mode), a rival geisha who can't bear to see Sayuri overshadow her.

Obsessive shots of rivers, kimonos, cherry blossoms and any other artifice that seems authentically "Japanese" are only interrupted when Gong breathlessly enters the frame. Gong says she only began learning English following "Memoirs," learning her lines phonetically, yet her line deliveries are the only ones loaded with any meaning. While Yeoh and Zhang are encumbered with dialogue that must have at one point begun with "Confucius say" until someone reminded the screenwriter that Confucius, like many of the actresses, is Chinese, Gong has a riotous time as Hatsumomo. The approach is all wrong, really, but she's the only one involved who thinks that a story about Japan deserves something better than narcoleptic dramaturgy.

Marshall is no Mikio Naruse, Kenji Mizoguchi or Yasujiro Ozu, even if his film shares those masters' devotion to slowness without attaining their sense of emotional gravity. Devoid of the anthropological worth Golden brought to his material, Marshall stages his "Memoirs" as a garish Epcot Center performance (Sayuri's dance number is particularly ridiculous) with shades of "Cinderella" and "All About Eve" so woefully over-dramatized that the result would be as campily great as "Showgirls" if Dion Beebe's cinematography weren't so languorous. Marshall's outsider approach to the material constantly defuses it of any worth and only succeeds in turning the world of the geisha into a snow globe of a fetish object.

Posted Wednesday, December 21, 2005

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