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About two hours into Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha Girl, one woman asks another woman, “What do we know about entertaining Americans?”
She was referring to the American troops occupying Japan after World War II, but I imagine the filmmakers behind this woefully misdirected and misguided film may have posed the same question.
Based on the Arthur Golden’s novel of the same – a novel people seem reluctant to admit reading (at least by my own experiences) -- the 145-minute film follows the story of Nitta Sayuri, a blue-eyed fish-town girl who went on to become Japan’s greatest geisha of her time.
Miscast in the lead role is Chinese actor Zhang Ziyi. A limited actor as it is, she and fellow Chinese actor Gong Li (Hatsumomo) and Malaysian actor Michelle Yeoh (Mameha) play Japanese women speaking in a hybrid of American and British English. If the elocution of these three women – all of whom are easy on the eyes and, along with Maggie Cheung, the best-known Asian female actors in the United States who are not from the US – an obvious commercial trope to sell tickets -- were not comical enough, some of lines looked dubbed, which reminds one of those dubbed kung fu movies of the 1970s (That Zhang and Yeoh are best known in the west for their kung fu films – they appeared together in Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – only adds to the kitschy effect).
To deflect this obvious flaw/distraction, a few Japanese words are thrown in for good measure; basic ones any filmgoer who eats sushi will recognize. Even when the geishas meet up with Americans, nothing in their elocution changes. Are we to assume the Americans speak fluent Japanese? (By the way, these criticisms can also be leveled at James Ivory’s The White Countess.)
This bogus anti-Nippon trope is further exacerbated by John William’s Sino-influenced score, and the inauthentic set design and cinematography – all of which smells of Zhang Yimou’s infinitely superior House of Flying Daggers.
Numbing down the book’s/film’s anti-female bondage message is Sayuri’s voiceover narration. The purpose of the voiceover is to supplement the audience with information it already knows from watching the film, but the filmmakers want to spell out for the audience anyway. Not only is it superfluous, Sayuri’s interpretation of what has happened to her sounds more Chinese-fortune cookie than a geisha “girl” truly understanding her plight in patriarchal Japan.
Why the filmmakers did this was obvious: they were reaching for an American audience. In particular it seems they were seeking the quasi-art-house/Academy Award audience that turned Marshall’s previous effort, Chicago, into overblown success it was.
At this point, it does not look like Memoirs of a Geisha will enjoy the success Chicago did in America -- financially, critically or otherwise.
Apparently Rob Marshall and company do not always know what entertains Americans either.
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