Film Review - Memoirs of a Geisha Film Review

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House review of Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

Beautiful, yet ultimately unsatisfying, just like the geisha it depicts, "Memoirs of a Geisha" is a 2005 film directed by Rob Marshall and based on the book by Arthur Golden. The main character, called Chiyo at the beginning and Sayuri later, is a young girl from a small fishing village who is taken from her home and taught to be one of the best geisha in Japan. Along the way, she has to deal with separation from her sister, jealousy from her fellow geisha-in-training, World War II, and more.

It was a beautiful movie from a cinematic standpoint, with vivid colors even in dark rooms, and very pretty actresses playing the geisha, clad in gorgeous costumes. The colors became more muted during particularly dark scenes such as those during the war as well. Much of the movie took place in traditional buildings with appropriately traditional furniture and decorations. The whole background was very well designed.

The main fault of the movie was the way it was culturally mixed when the story was about a Japanese tradition and set in Japan. Several of the main actresses were Chinese, not Japanese, including the adult Sayuri herself, played by Ziyi Zhang. In addition, one main actor was actually Korean (Randall Duk Kim playing Dr. Crab). Perhaps the producers assumed that most Americans would not be able to tell the difference, but for someone who has studied and lived in Japan, the difference was quite obvious.

While the movie was set in Japan, it was produced as an English-language film, and this really hurt its sense of authenticity. Not only having Chinese faces, but also Chinese tongues speaking English gave it a veneer of being generically Asian rather than Japanese in particular, since a Japanese accent in English is different from a Chinese accent in English. As the geisha are a distinctly Japanese tradition, this was not a good effect.

One oddity of making an English-language film is the way that some names are translated and some are not. For instance, the main character's geisha name, Sayuri, means "lily," and in English, she easily could have been called "Lily." But they left the Japanese name as it was. On the other hand, one of her fellow geisha was called Pumpkin. This is probably not a real name in either English or (as translated) Japanese, but the decision was made to have it in English rather than Japanese.

The producers also insisted on dropping in a few Japanese words here and there, in an attempt to make the movie sound more Japanese. This just made it worse because it was already apparent from the accents that not all of the actresses were Japanese. Then trying to make them pronounce Japanese just heightened the effect. The movie really should have just been completely in Japanese, even with the Chinese actresses, if they could have managed that much Japanese. Probably fewer people would have been able to tell that the accents were off if they had all been speaking Japanese the whole time.

The scene at the very beginning with young Chiyo and her sister was probably the best scene in the movie because it was completely in Japanese with Japanese actresses. That scene at the beginning almost promised that the whole film was going to be in Japanese; however, the language soon switched to English in a very jarring manner. If it had begun in English and then had a flashback to that scene in Japanese, the disjoint would have been less severe. The whole movie really should have been like that first scene, however.

As a result, the best way to find out about Sayuri and her experiences would probably be to watch the first few scenes of the movie for atmosphere and then go read the book. As they say, the book is usually better than the movie, and this case is no exception.

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