No one can accuse Rob Marshall of making the same film twice.
A couple of years ago, Marshall directed the razzle-dazzle, Roaring Twenties musical Chicago to Oscar victory. For his second film, he has turned to the quietly subdued romantic drama of Arthur Golden's bestseller, Memoirs of a Geisha.
It's set in a Japanese geisha house, where young women are groomed to be eye-catchingly beautiful, servile to the male customers and capable of serving tea or dancing a well-choreographed routine when need be. Neither wife nor prostitute, a geisha is an artist (the word "gei" means "art" in Japanese) who earns her living entertaining powerful men. This is about as far as you can get from Roxie Hart and the women on Death Row in Chicago.
Golden borrowed the most melodramatic themes from Charles Dickens and Margaret Mitchell, gave them an Oriental spin, and found millions of readers for his tale of romance and tribulation.
Memoirs of a Geisha revolves around a young woman who is sold to a geisha house as a young girl by her impoverished fisherman father in the late 1920s, loses track of her older sister, who has been sold to a "pleasure house," rises to become a geisha superstar, raises the jealous ire of the house's previous star geisha, faces post-war deprivations, eventually returns to the stage, and all the while searches for the love of her life, a well-connected man who befriended her as a child. Whew! That's enough history for three lifetimes.
In a different time and place, the lovely Sayuri could have been Scarlett O'Hara -- or even Oliver Twist!
All this unfolds at deliberate, detailed and, some will find, rather slow speed. Yet Marshall has immersed us in such a totally different culture and era than our own in Memoirs of a Geisha (even though much of it was filmed not in Japan, but just outside Los Angeles), that his gorgeous-looking film sweeps us away in its fascinating tale.
It's certainly not everyone's cup of green tea, though. One man at a preview screening was heard snoring loudly from time to time. But for hopeless romantics, and for those who want to be taken out of this time and place, the film will do the trick.
As a child, Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo) faces her first trauma. Whisked from her coastal home to work in a geisha house, she is immediately separated from her beloved sister, who is sent to another house. In the geisha house, under the tutelage of the house owner, Mother (Kaori Momoi), little Chiyo can't seem to do anything right and is severely reprimanded. Yet Mother sees something in the young Chiyo's fragile beauty and her deep blue eyes that might one day be molded into "a moving work of art."
As Chiyo's star rises, she is renamed Sayuri (now played by Ziyi Zhang) and becomes a favorite of the male customers. Her celebrity wins the immediate ire of Hatsumomo (Gong Li), the previous bright light of the geisha house, who plots to undo Sayuri's good name. But Sayuri has a mentor in the lovely Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), who takes the younger woman under her wing and trains her in the art of the geisha so that someday she will make a good match with some important gentleman.
And there are several gentlemen who are swayed by Sayuri's great beauty. But her heart is saved for only one, even though he seems out of reach, a man known as the Chairman (Ken Watanabe) who befriended her and offered her comfort as a child.
Sayuri's world, "as forbidden as it is fragile," is played out on lovely sets that add to the romance. Marshall, who is a celebrated choreographer as well as director, has staged a beautiful dance for Sayuri. Dressed in an elaborate silk kimono and eight-inch-high platform shoes, lit from above by a dozen red paper lanterns, she glides across the stage in a gentle yet arousing dance that ends in the swirl of a snowstorm.
Soon after, Marshall artfully stages a seduction scene that's played against the reflections of Sayuri and her seducer in a mirror. But the moment, for her, turns bad and ends in disaster.
Zhang, who came to international attention in such martial arts films as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and House of Flying Daggers, has an ethereal beauty and grace (she has studied dance from age 11), but also the vulnerability that makes Sayuri such a sympathetic figure. There's also a strong will and resolve behind the delicate face that gives her an intensity of purpose. Her Sayuri is not going to be a pushover for the evil schemes of Hatsumomo.
The beautiful Yeoh, who co-starred with Zhang in Crouching Tiger, is a standout as the older, wiser Mameha, who has her own secret agenda for pushing Sayuri's career. Also good is Youki Kudoh as Pumpkin, a not-quite-pretty-enough-to-become-a-geisha "friend" of Sayuri who, in post-war Japan, twists the plot in a new direction.
Marshall has made a lovely film with characters who look as delicate as a lotus blossom, yet exhibit a steely resolve underneath. Scarlett O' Hara would have been proud.
****
Memoirs of a Geisha
Starring: Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh, Gong Li, Koji Yakusho, Youki Kudoh, Kaori Momoi, Tsai Chin, Cary-Jiroyuki Tagawa, Suzuka Ohgo.
Rated: PG-13, contains adult themes, sexual situations.
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