Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of Geisha

Went to see this film yesterday with high hopes and was mightily disappointed. In spite of the fact that the Geion District of Kyoto was determined to be too modern looking and was passed by for a reconstruction in California and that the three main female actresses were Chinese not Japanese, the film was still strikingly beautiful. Then the delight ended.

There was no doubt as to why the heroine was sold by her poor family, but from there on the motivations seemed opaque and the narrative jumpy and incomplete. The initial separation from her sister was a matter of “I’ll take this one and not that one. No visual persona or action jumps out that would make her and not her sister or fifty other dirty kids the choice for geishadom. This motivational insufficiency continues to haunt the screenplay. As our heroine ages, we get too little explanation for the infighting and backbiting that tries to drive the action and we get too little of her training struggle in comparison to others in training. How can we accept that she is the best there is unless she is shown to have exceeded others in the stable. And I do not choose the word "stable" lightly. The women are indeed treated as if they were in one though horses would probably not be treated as cruelly. In another narrative non-sequitar, a nasty fire is set by her nemesis in the house. As she spreads lamp fuel around the wood and paper house it would appear as if the characters, the house, indeed the whole district will go up in flames. Cut. One to another scene and we never know how anyone got out or survived.

Mostly the film seems to concentrate on how a Japanese woman survives a life that is defined by continued arbitrary removal of all that she loves or would seek to love. WW II arrives by air in a glorious surprising image that is always a part of the advertising trailers. It surprises because for the first two hours the film strives mightily to obscure any possible attachment to a historical event. The world of the geisha is or was one with no context whatsoever. The participants seem to have had no knowledge of anything outside of their own cocoon. We have no more intrusion by the invasion of Korea or China than we do of instruction in what will happen after your virginity has been auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Over-all the film is over-pretty, over-long, and under plotted. What did you think?