Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
‘Fasten your obi, it’s going to be a bumpy continuously…’ The line is not at any time actually spoken, but the acidic tang of ‘All On touching Eve’, with its cat-calls and bawd-fights, hangs over this adaptation of Arthur Golden’s all-conquering novel adulate a cynical panache observer. Spanning the ’30s and ’40s, ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ traces the fortunes of Chiyo, bundled rancid as a sprog to endure get-up-and-go on the butt rung of an okiya (geisha household), triumphantly reinvented as ultra-glam Sayuri but thrown another curveball when war breaks visible.
Rob Marshall’s first film was ‘Chicago’ and ‘Memoirs…’ ain’t without warning on razzle-dazzle. Colours, costumes and enterprise are relentlessly luminous, ritzy and exquisite, measured at the plot’s lowest points: when Sayuri is cruelly ravished, it’s in front of a solicitation of antique kimonos; when she’s evacuated to pastoral lack yards of marvellous silk still billow in the frighten. Could these be intended as intimations of the dark side of glamour? If so, they ring furrow in a film rendered kitsch by its own incontrovertible wile: the liberties with Japanese period particularly, the use of Chinese actors, the English duologue.
Yet ‘Memoirs…’ does promise as a tale of ‘this tiny faction of women’, with its acerbic rivalry and unexpected charity. Gong Li steals the represent as bitchy high point dog Hatsumomo while Michelle Yeoh is all domain as Sayuri’s mentor. Zhang Ziyi is sympathetic in the lead but Sayuri is at bottom dispiritingly lamblike: while all yon her sisters are doing it for themselves, she is moulded by others and longs only as a large, strong man. This fairy-tale ickiness pales besides such bracingly obnoxious moments as when the okiya maw, suspecting Hatsumomo of illicit copulation, jams her fingers into her crotch and sneeringly sniffs.