Memoirs of a Geisha | Review

Book to screen adaptation gets a lifeless translation from strong femme headlining cast.

If it looks Hollywood, and feels Hollywood then there was little chance of seeing the adaptation of Arthur Golden’s popular book take a more Japanese point of view. Changing more hands than a phony twenty dollar bill, the long-awaited adaptation has seen a long list of talent trying to bring this item from pulp to celluloid, clearly the difficulty is that Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha feels so Americanized that even if the English prose was replaced by a more authentic Japanese lingo, it would still look and come across as stiff.

Glances, opportunities, hearts, childhoods and kimonos are all for the taking, or rather – fit into a long list of stolen, or abused items. The Geisha way is a sophisticated prostitution system with better benefits than a worker at a Gap plant, but the women in white face and with fancy tea pouring abilities are unfortunately immersed into a highly competitive world – where chance at top dollar is key to long term survival. Here the central character (Zhang Ziyi) whose self-worth is that of a basic commodity, anchors herself to the symbolic value of a handkerchief. As the narrative tries in vain to convince viewers that the passing of the seasons makes the heart grow founder, unfortunately both longing and suffering aren’t made available in the power cast of actors’ performances and neither in the suggested Lolita-like connection. If only the film could have expanded the kindness of a stranger act to more scenes further down the timeline that didn’t involve a hanky but instead involved a deeper connection between the two – (even a Besson’s The Professional anecdote would have been appropriate) then perhaps we’d be aching for the film’s conclusion.

Taking into consideration that Asian/Japanese culture are reserved in their mannerisms, it should fathomable that the two-plus hour romance is so void in emotion and that it requires – no tissue usage. While the drama is empty in sentiment, it isn’t void in production value. The attention to detail in terms of the mise-en-scene and camera movement especially in the first-half portion of the film pegs the film with a instant beauty, and the marvelously decorated dance sequence is one step up from the razzle-dazzle swift-cutting technique found in Marshall’s Oscar-winning Chicago.

The problem here is how the actors struggle to express themselves in a language which is foreign to them –a different tongue means problems in how some of the emotions get filtered and most of the unbalance comes from dialogue and the ensemble phonetics. While Marshall does a great job at explaining Geisha culture and the film looks technically looks good, Memoirs of a Geisha fails to capture the essence of suppressed emotions, instead this falls more into cliché and leaves viewer’s unaffected. Think baked potatoes without the toppings. For a holiday screen romance, try the flipside – an Asian’s perspective of Americana and an added love story narrative with, Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.

Rating 2 stars