Memoirs of a Geisha

dir. Rob Marshall

Written by Arthur Golden, a white American man with a thorough knowledge of Japanese culture, the novel Memoirs of a Geisha was a fake translation of a nonexistent autobiography. It’s a rags-to-mistress story, in which Chiyo, an orphan girl with unusual gray eyes, becomes Sayuri, the most sought-after geisha in the hanamachi district. With a near-fetishistic accumulation of detail, Golden whipped up a fog of exoticism so thick it almost masked the soap opera shrillness of the plot.

Out comes the movie, and off comes the mask. Another white American man (the director of Chicago, no less) directs, and the dialogue is in halting English. Gone is the pretense to authenticity (big-name Chinese actresses play the Japanese characters, the cherry blossom festival was filmed in Pasadena) and the plot lies quivering and naked, like—well, like that scene where the beautiful Sayuri stabs herself in the thigh to attract the attention of a rich doctor.

The okiya where the geisha live is, we learn, a mysterious place that alternates between ritual and claws-out catfights. When Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang in cornflower blue contacts) is plucked from obscurity, she attracts both men’s desire and the vicious jealousy of Hatsumomo (Gong Li), an older geisha with a penchant for off-hours hanky panky. Their rivalry shamelessly pits virgin against vamp, and its campy excess provides the film’s few pleasures (“I… will… DESTROY YOU!” has got to be one of this year’s most memorable lines). The rest of the film is a confused mess—part chick flick drowning in silk brocade, part crass appeal to male voyeurism, and all woefully insubstantial.