This ludicrously misconceived project has made no one happy. We have here a story about Japanese women written and directed by Western men, with the lead actresses being Chinese! Did anybody involved in the project ever use that atrophied organ, the brain, to think what they were doing? Of course Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi ('with eyes like rain') and Michelle Yeoh are marvellous. We love them! But they are Chinese, as is Eugenia Yuan, and even the strangely-named Zoe Weizenbaum of America, who is presumably either half-Chinese or an adopted Chinese. One of the male actors was Chinese, and another was Korean. All of these three peoples, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, hate being mistaken for one another by Westerners, and they are all extremely different. You cannot just throw everyone together in a porridge and expect anything coherent to emerge, pretending that it is an authentic depiction of one of the most subtle aspects of Japanese culture. Apparently, the lack of authenticity is evident everywhere you look with sets and costumes and hair and gestures, and even the music is Chinese. It was wonderful to hear Yo-yo Ma playing the cello (but he is of course Chinese) and Yitzhak Perlmann playing the violin. John Williams wrote a good film score, but it was not Japanese of course. There were also some idiotic moments in the film, such as a raging fire which suddenly stops because the script says it should. If only fires responded to command like that in real life! There are wonderful, magic moments in the film, and deeply moving performances, - Chinese performances. Gong Li, in particular, was magnificent as a woman possessed by insane envy and capable of anything. (I wouldn't want to meet her in the dark in either a Japanese or a Chinese alley.) Japanese culture is deeply mysterious to all of us who have not lived there, and there are many unpleasant aspects to it (the latest statistics say that one Japanese commits suicide every 15 minutes!). No one outside Japan really understands geishas, and I can only presume and hope that the Japanese themselves do (perhaps they do not). What is a geisha? I have seen this film and still do not know. As for people selling their children, that we can understand, and it is a really disgusting way to start a movie. There are many disgusting aspects to this story, and I wonder how many of those aspects are authentic, and how many are fantasy. This was a lost opportunity to try to tell the world who and what the Japanese are, if they themselves know (maybe their suicide rate indicates that they are not certain, or perhaps they know too well). The Japanese have a xenophobia problem, and as long as they go on refusing to apologise for their massacres and war crimes, they will remain one of the world's most hated peoples. This film merely turns up the heat and shows more reasons to despise them. It cannot have been anyone's intention to make a difficult international situation even worse, so what kind of morons planned this production?
Review of Memoirs of a Geisha
