The film adaptation of the best-selling novel Memoirs of a Geisha follows the story of a young Japanese girl sold to a geisha house in Kyoto during the late 1930s. The narrative development comes courtesy of the fictional true confessions of Sayuri’s forbidden desire for love and happiness while one of Japan’s most celebrated geisha. In traditional Japanese culture the literary meaning of geisha is ‘a person of the arts;’ a woman trained in the native practice of tea ceremony, ikebana and poetry. For a geisha it is customary to insist that rich men pay for their talents and polite conversation rather than their sexual services. In ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ however, this central ideology is reversed as Sayuri’s virginity is sold off to the highest bidder.

What I found most striking about Memoirs of a Geisha is its westernisation of 1940s Japan through the post World War II imagery centered very much around the American military. Sayuri returns from her exile during the war to a place flooded with American soldiers and make-shift taverns where the accustomed geisha is replaced by any oriental female in red lipstick. The authenticity of this film I feel mainly suffered from the use of English dialect (especially as I believed Ziya Zhang was unable to speak a word of it) and the tendency to tone down the visual iconography of a geisha’s dress and makeup. The purpose of diluting this image I feel was to occupy a central ground between the imposing contrasts of contemporary makeup styles and the ‘grotesque’ image of a Western drag queen. More importantly however is the somewhat conscious refusal of director Rob Marshall to recognise the diversity of culture not only between the East and West but between the regions of Asia through his castings of CHINESE actresses to play divine JAPANESE geishas (a point that I didn’t pick up on until today.)

Since the war when Japan invaded parts of China and brutally disregarded the Chinese people, national identity is a trait likely to cause much aggression should ignorant pan-Asianism occur. It is still unknown whether the film will get its scheduled February release in China due to the uproar Zhang et al have provoked by depicting ‘relationships with Japanese men as common prostitutes’ but as far as a movie about Japan played by Chinese actors/actresses written by whites and shot mainly in America (L.A,) I think it’s pretty good.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 11:17 am and is filed under Reviews and tagged as film, geisha, japan. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.