Memoirs of a Geisha

I always knew it would be hard to make a good film. Sadly, Rob Marshall doesn’t quite pull it off.

I’m not gonna review this film properly. Pretty much everything I thought was already said by Roger Ebert, and I suspect his film criticism will long outlive mine! He even made the same comparison I made in my review of the book:

‘I felt some of the same feelings [of unease that Memoirs of a Geisha evoked] during "Pretty Baby," the 1978 film in which Brooke Shields, playing a girl of 12, has her virginity auctioned away in New Orleans. The difference is that "Pretty Baby" doesn't evoke nostalgia, or regret the passing of the world it depicts.’

Golden’s book survived on lavish prose and the very foreign subject matter, plus the sense of authority evoked in the detailed descriptions of 1940s Gion (and I now hear Golden’s getting sued by one of the women he interviewed because he stuck too closely to her life story, which I can easily believe). Underneath, once Sayuri had grown up, was a very cheesy love story that meandered about, relying heavily on heavy amounts of contrivance. All that Marshall had as a substitute for the prose was beautiful cinematography. And this was a stunning film. Really beautiful. But the cheesy melodrama ended up exposed for what it was. Even the power struggles between senior Geisha that seemed believable and tragic in the book suddenly seemed bloated and over-the-top.

This would have been fine, in small amounts. But the film just dragged on and on and on with nothing really driving the story, and barely a moment of tension to hold the interest of the viewer punctuated the drab underclothes hidden beneath all the beautiful kimono. I ended up being more entertained by the score than the story.

I had no problem with the lead actresses being Chinese. Perhaps they could have worked on their pronunciation a little more (you could tell who was Japanese and who wasn’t simply by how they said ‘Sayuri’), but it worked fine. The problem was the heavy accents used throughout. Yes, little Chiyo looked the part, but she, as well as pretty much every other major character, just delivered the lines so woodenly and so obviously, as though there was no need for good acting, since they were speaking with heavy accents. It put a big barrier between me and the characters. I think the only times it was ever surmounted were when there was nothing being said, and the acting was purely physical.

Not a good film, and certainly not one I’d sit through again, for all the visual spectacle. A shame, but not a surprise.