Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

The project of filming this best-selling book has been floating around Hollywood for what seems like ages and for a long time it was described as the "next" Steven Spielberg film.  In the end it was entrusted to Rob Marshall after his success with "Chicago", with Spielberg producing.  It was a rich and generally rewarding viewing experience without being totally absorbing and I don't know that it would have been any better had Spielberg taken over the reins, since it is somewhat different from his usual interests.  The bare bones of the story concerns the history of a young girl, sold together with her sister from whom she is soon separated, into bondage, and of her eventual training and success as a geisha.  The film is careful to avoid confusing the artistic side of a geisha with the sexual, and indeed there is virtually no explicit sex shown.  However, one is well aware that a geisha's life shares a great deal with a prostitute's and that it is one lifestyle that disallows any personal pursuit of the romantic ideal.  Not having read the novel, I don't know if the ending has been "Hollywoodized", but it somehow did ring false.

The positive virtues of the film include the gorgeous cinematography. costumes and art design and the three leading actresses -- Gong Li, Michelle Yeoh, and Zhang Ziyi -- are all excellent.  However it remains something of a mystery why these leads were taken by well-known Chinese actresses rather than Japanese ones, especially since the main male leads were all played by Japanese actors.  Perhaps as Westerners we are not meant to notice this anomaly.  The other peculiarity is that the movie, being a prestige Hollywood production, was made, of course, totally in English; the actors' variable comfort with the spoken language made it something of a struggle to understand all of the dialogue (English subtitles on the DVD did help), but the film must have suffered mightily with its cinema audience and this probaby accounts for its relative failure.