Memoirs of a Geisha
“Geisha,” Mameha informs us, “are not courtesans and we are not wives. ‘Geisha’ means artist, and to be geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art.” She eventually negotiates with the house to take Chiyo under her wing, as a protége to rival Pumpkin who is now under the tutelage of Hatsumomo. The housemistresses suspect Mameya is seeking revenge against Chiyo…
Ziyi Zhang stars in Columbia Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment’s
“Memoirs of a Geisha.” Photo by: David James. Copyright ©2004, Sony Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
“Water can carve its way through stone, and when trapped, water makes a new path,” says our narrator, Sayuri.
Waves crash ashore of the Japanese coast. Sakamoto (Mako) is conversing with a man, presumably negotiating something. He pulls his daughters away from their sleep and hurries them on to a cart. Sakamoto is selling his daughters, Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo) and her sister, to a hanamachi—a geisha district—in Kyoto, 1929.
At the hanamachi, Chiyo encounters Hatsumomo (Li Gong), a geisha. Hatsumomo considers herself the best in the district, and immediately takes Chiyo—whose eyes are a fierce, cobalt blue—under her wing, to humiliate her out of abject jealousy. As Hatsumomo’s apprentice, however, Chiyo is to be schooled in the ways of a geisha, and doesn’t yet know what one is.
Pumpkin (Zoë Weizenbaum), another apprentice, befriends Chiyo. They become like sisters. However, they will soon become reluctant rivals as the are forcibly indentured and indoctrinated into a servitude that’s fundamentally an escort service with an exhorbitant pricetag—bearing, however, the same delusions about its own scope and purpose.
Hatsumomo bribes one of the old ladies running the geisha school to obtain a treasured kimono belonging to her rival, Mameha (Michelle Yeoh). The bitter Hatsumomo forces Chiyo to paint on Mameha’s kimono. While this initially causes great trouble for Chiyo, her fortunes shall also see a reversal—not before she attempts, and fails, to escape the compound.
“There is a poem called ‘Loss’,” our narrator tells us. “It has three words, but they are scratched out. You cannot read ‘Loss.’ You can only feel it.” While I agree that the film is rife with philosophical platitudes, almost to deafening degree, this one happens to fit the moment.
Shortly thereafter, our young Chiyo happens upon a generous, charismatic man, known only as the Chairman (Ken Watanabe). He buys her a treat, and leaves her some money in a handkerchief. Chiyo goes to the temple, and offers up all the money “in exchange” for a wish. Because of the Chairman’s kindness, she becomes infatuated—even at this young age—with him and she hopes one day to be reunited with him. But these hopes are all but dashed as she is reduced to a slave when her repeated mishaps, including the fall, cost the geisha house considerably.
“Geisha,” Mameha informs us, “are not courtesans and we are not wives. ‘Geisha’ means artist, and to be geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art.” She eventually negotiates with the house to take Chiyo under her wing, as a protége to rival Pumpkin who is now under the tutelage of Hatsumomo. The housemistresses suspect Mameya is seeking revenge against Chiyo for the kimono. Mameya is too intelligent to believe Chiyo did it alone, and has revenge of entirely another kind in mind.
Chiyo, now 15, has been given the name Sayuri (our narrator). If she is to bring wealth to the hanamachi, clear her debts, and live as a free woman (relatively speaking), she must master skills in a fraction of the time it normally takes to train a geisha. She is presented with a considerable dilemma when, by Mameha’s design, she is invited to court the interests of Nobu (Kôji Yakusho), an electrical company executive. I wouldn’t be spoiling anything by asking you to hazard a guess at who Nobu’s boss happens to be. Indeed, it requires incredible restraint for Sayuri to follow her preordained path. However, when Pumpkin and Hatsumomo re-enter the picture, another strategy must be employed for survival.
Survival is essentially what the film is about, in more ways than one. The timeline eventually intersects with World War II, and you can imagine the cultural upheaval that takes place. Unfortunately, you will have to imagine a lot of it. Aside from a few shots of American soldiers and jeeps lining the streets, we only hear references to bombed factories. Ironically, Edward Zwick’s “The Last Samurai” and Isao Takahata’s brilliant “Grave of the Fireflies” spend much more time visually disseminating the change Western civilization’s military influences brought to Japan during the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, respectively. The film only requires a passive viewer, except when trying to make sense of the English dialogue in the hands of many of the otherwise talented cast whose performances may have flowed more naturally, and with greater psychological weight, in Japanese.
That being said, the immensely talented Li Gong is perhaps wasted here. As portrayed in the film, Hatsumomo is an incredibly one-dimensional character—which makes her less interesting as an adversary. Consider, for example, in Kurosawa’s “Ran” the serpentine Lady Kaede, the greatest psychological villain in Japanese cinema. Ziyi Zhang is palatable, sufficient, but dare I say Suzuka Ohgo, given her young age, demonstrates more dynamic range and sincerity in her potrayal. Ken Watanabe is, however, an exceptional actor. The only character I began to feel genuinely compelled to appreciate was his Chairman. Michelle Yeoh’s Mameha is also quite wonderful, but again I wanted to see her performance in Japanese. As Watanabe has demonstrated in other roles, there’s both intensity and nuance in Japanese in many ways that cannot easily be translated into American semantics.
Like Mameha’s definition of “geisha,” this film is a sort of work of art—but a shallow one. It’s pretty to look at, while you’re watching it, but it lacks compelling imagery that sticks with you. In the animated “Grave of the Fireflies,” there are many heartbreaking images that will churn in your stomach long after you’ve watched the film. In “The Last Samurai,” Zwick does at least dive more deeply into the essential traditions, characteristics, philosophy and values of Japanese culture. In “Memoirs,” it’s all gloss, and glossed-over. Our opportunity to learn about geisha traditions and training is reduced to a couple of routine montages in which the dynamics of popular Western cinema are foolishly applied to eastern culture (that is to say contemplation on singular images is not valued at all). Nevermind the language… I presume having two Chinese (Ziyi Zhang and Li Gong) and one Malaysian )actress (Michelle Yeoh) made it rather difficult to do otherwise, but having the majority of the film in English instead of Japanese also contributes to a less-than-memorable film.
It may be a function of the fact that the novel upon which this film was based was itself written by a Westerner, Arthur Golden, but the performances, I feel, could have been far more captivating, and have stood out from the morass of English-spoken popular films that are flooding the market this holiday season. In a later subplot, again concerning survival, the post-War geisha must find new opportunities, and are recruited into a new business proposition—to pursue the interests of American investors to help Japanese industry back on its feet. In doing so, they are required to adopt some American customs. Isn’t it ironic, then, that Columbia Pictures, a wholly-owned subsidary of Japanese conglomerate Sony, has made a film whose storytelling technique appears to be driven heavily by a need to satisfy American moviegoers, rather than being true to the idiosyncrasies of the culture, the visual, psychological and oral traditions of pre-War Japan?
Memoirs of a Geisha • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 • Running Time: 145 minutes • MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature subject matter and some sexual content. • Distributed by Columbia Pictures