Memoirs Of A Geisha review

Anyone looking to Memoirs Of A Geisha to provide an illuminating glimpse into the mysterious world of a geisha is going to be disappointed. Based on Arthur Golden's best selling novel, director Rob Marshall and screenwriter Robin Swicord are less concerned with unveiling some of the secrets of the ancient tradition than turning it into the basis for a melodramatic oriental soap opera, replete with bitching rivalries and forbidden love.

Set in a fictitious hanamachi (geisha district), Memoirs exists in some sort of soft-focused, vivid dreamlike state with few connections to the real world. The pre WWII Japan portrayed resembles more a romanticized western notion than a true depiction, caused in part by the fact that the film was shot in the occidental surroundings of Ventura County north of Los Angeles where a Japanese village was recreated. This feeling of artifice extends to the casting which features two Chinese women in central roles.

One is Ziyi Zhang, who plays the enigmatic and beautiful Sayuri who at nine-years old is plucked, along with her sister, from her rural upbringing and taken to the city where she is promptly separated from her sibling and placed in an okiya (geisha household) and inducted into the rituals of a maiko (apprentice geisha).

Sayuri's disciplined life, overseen by the okiya's Mother (Kaori Momoi) and made tougher by the formidable and cruel Hatsumomo (Gong Li), the hanamachi's most celebrated geisha, is affected indelibly when as a young girl she is struck by the attention and kind gesture of a passing stranger. The Chairman (Ken Watanabe) is a prominent citizen and over the coming years has regular dealings with the okiya, but the blossoming Sayuri, bound by the strict tenets of a geisha, is not allowed to pursue her true love.

Much is made of the jealousy of the once imperious Hatsumomo and the emerging challenger for her crown. The cat fighting scrap for geisha supremacy includes rival okiya's contender Pumpkin (Youki Kudoh). The word geisha derives from gei, meaning art. While this is meant to imply that her refined skills and beauty make her an artist, in Memoirs it is more her skills as an arch vixen that are on show.

The visual splendour that Marshall brought to Chicago is again evident, but whereas his directorial debut was exhilarating and energetic, this follow-up is all too dull and languid. One memorable scene in which Sayuri dances seductively in a club atop vertiginous platform boots hints at a more flamboyant approach to the material, but set within nearly two and half hours of more constrained boundaries, it only highlights Memoirs' failings.

Kevin Murphy