1/1/2024 0 Comments Memories of a geisha filmThe romantic climax to Memoirs offers us an interesting point of comparison of the Western and Eastern aesthetic of love. I've seen similar theatrics at the famed Kaburenjo theatre in Gion during the cherry-blossom Miyako Odori performance season in Kyoto admittedly in the 21st century. When Chiyo, now the grown geisha Sayuri, performs a signature dance in public for all her potential patrons, the figure of her teetering on two-foot clogs in a stylised snow-storm is rather over the top and, dare one say it, reminiscent of other (Chinese) spectaculars in which Zhang has made her name (for example The House of Flying Daggers).īut on the other hand, the preceding group dance of geisha, which I've seen criticized for its gaudiness (more like a striptease!) does not seem so far from the truth. Other attempts at spectacle are less successful. The first time it leads nowhere, and is just a temporary respite, but when the same image is repeated at the very end, her dream has become a reality, and the image, like her heart, is rejuvenated and resonant. This timeless image is emblematic of her attempt to escape from her prison-like life as a servant-girl. Then there is the exhilarated Chiyo, running through the tunnel of orange torii gates at Fushimi-Inari Shrine in southern Kyoto. In one scene, the desperate little Chiyo, falling from a roof in an attempt to escape her kidnappers', turns, with a deft bit of editing, into the sliding abacus beads that have just calculated her ensuing bill to the doctor, a bill that indebts her further to the okiya (boarding house for geisha) that holds her in thrall. (This is very much what Peter Greenaway bade us do with his Chinese actress Vivian Wu in the 1996 reworking of the Japanese literary classic The Pillow Book.)Īnd there are indeed moments of artistry in Memoirs that aspire to that elusive kind of cinematic magic that transcends questions of authenticity. We are asked to view the film as a fable, as Marshall said at an interview in Tokyo in other words, to accept it as a work of art rather than a biopic. Given that the provenance of the source material itself is in dispute, the fact that director Rob Marshall chose to cast three high-profile Chinese actresses in the lead roles (demure Zhang Ziyi, gracious Michelle Yeoh and a vamped-up Gong Li) means that this film cannot claim to be a definitive take on the Willow World. This film is known in Japan as Sayuri, the work name of the eponymous geisha whose memoirs are purportedly memorialised in this Hollywood retelling.Īrthur Golden's original work is controversial: beloved by millions of Western readers for its portrayal of a hidden world, it was disowned by the geisha, Iwasaki Mineko, whose life story was part of its inspiration.
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