Memoirs Of A Gay What...?

A few weeks ago I posted up complaints by Chinese people about how their stars were in a movie about Japanese courtezans. Well, I went to watch it and came out shaking my head.
Without further ado (or as my brother likes to say, "awith further a-don't"...) here's my quickfire review:

What's Good About It:
I'm sure the details are meticulously researched and applied; and there is a certain visual comfort to the film that nothing sticks out in the background as being "That's just not Japan". If a film could be praised for accumulating tiny little brownie points for details, well, this film certainly deserves it.

Also, the performances by the women are really solid. I found Gong Li's portrayal of the top Geisha a little un-Japanese in her psychotic mood, and I also found Michelle Yeoh's geisha a lot more martial artist than dance artist. They're not bad, it's just that the mood they create is so at odds with the understated aspects of Japanese social behaviour. In its defense, I guess you could always say, this film is a piece of fiction, but presumably this is kind of a biopic.

Ziyi Zhang is cute as usual and basically she can carry that easily. Kaori Momoi and Youki Kudoh are the Japanese participants in an otherwise Chinese cast, and their input is serviceable. Ken Watanabe is Ken Watanabe and Koji Yakusho is Koji Yakusho and there are no great discoveries here.

It's basically a pretty weak film supported on the strength of the interest we have in good actors, and maybe that makes it a director's piece. It's certainly not an auteur putting a stamp on the world of cinema; it's more like a workman trying to make head or tail of something he's not really interested in.

What's Bad About It:
The whole thing is just abject Orientalist fantasy. It goes to great lengths to explain the Geisha business from a certain perspective but never really gets its head around the cultural raison d'etre of the industry. You watch very westernised emotions on the face of asiatic faces thinking, "why is this so alienating?"

Or put another way, it looks like Japan, but not any Japan on this planet. The rest of it is pure Hollwood projection, but projection is the very name of the businiess, is it not?
The picture never rises above the level of westernised schlock that it sets it self in the early scenes.

The Japanese have a joke that the first 5 words a foreigner arrives with are: Fuji-yama, Geisha, Sushi, Samurai and Ninja. This film attempts to cover no 2. where 'Last Samurai' attempted to cover no. 4.

Other Comments:


This film is winning some 'rotten tomatoes' early in the piece and it's not entirely fair. I'd watch it again simply because I didn't fully comprehend why Spielberg wanted to produce this movie. It's not as bad as 'Last Samurai', which was a truly laughable experience.

It did make me think about this business of rocking up to somebody else's country and making a movie in English and imposing English cultural mores onto the peerformances. Like, is the Venice in 'Casanova' really anything like Venice? ...and yet there's a trailer for a movie starring Heath Ledger and Sienna Miller as denizens of that historic space. What's that going to look like? What'ss it going to look like to Venetians? The worldwide audience probably doesn't care, but on another level, shouldn't a story like that be left to the Venetians to tell? Then again, does a movie Venice really need to be Venice? Isn't it all like the Paris set in 'Team America' where all the famous landmarks are parked on the same city block?

The flipside that I can't help but ask myself is , "what the hell would this material look like had a Japanese director like Yoji Yamada been given the directorial chair?" I say this because I saw a Time review that said the Chinese actors were in the leading roles because there weren't any good actors who could carry the lead role in Japan.

Purists may complain that the three main geishas are played by Chinese women speaking English, which they were taught to intone in a lightly Japanese accent. It is a shame that a film with so specific a setting could not have leading ladies steeped in that culture. But there's a bald fact that is evident to anyone familiar with today's East Asian films: China is rich in top actresses, and Japan isn't.

---(break)---

Lucy Fisher, one of the film's producers, was aware of grumbling about the casting of Chinese actresses as the most prominent geishas. Some of these barbs made it to the set. According to Fisher, Watanabe overheard one such comment. He turned around and stated, "There is no actress in the world who could play this part better than Zhang Ziyi." As Fisher recalls: "That was a happy day for everybody." Watanabe sees Geisha not as a documentary but as fiction woven by its director. "Although it is a period piece based in Japanese culture, what was most important was how Rob envisioned it. So I told myself not to be concerned about the details of the Japanese or geisha culture but try to help Rob create what he envisioned."

With all due respect to the great actors who are in this film, does one really believe that they're the only people who could have played those roles on the planet? Or is that another dose of cultural imperialism being dished out by Time magazine? Isn't it possible that the cultural things that click in Japan but don't click in the west are exactly the sorts of things you'd be looking to include in a movie about Japanese cultural mores? Not exclude them?

To be honest, the film betrays absolutely no meditation on this isssue. I think I'm actually less comfortable with this issue than Geisha's director Rob Marshall who says he "casts for the role, period". In other words, he doesn't take off his cultural bias for one second, and the film is far worse for it.
Don't watch it at the cinema; get it on a weekly DVD rental somewhere down the track.