So I don't really have much desire to see Memoirs of a Geisha. At one point I might have, but everything I've seen and heard makes it sound like someone's silk-screen fetish swallowed the screen. I like Zhang Ziyi a lot, and I LOVE Michelle Yeoh, but this film just isn't much on my radar. Probably Netflix it when the time comes.
But this review in the Village Voice? Hysterical, and almost made me want to see it in the theater.
"Chinese actresses play Japanese geisha (in a period concurrent with the Sino-Japanese war) and speak English the way Hollywood has always imagined Asians do, all stilted syntax and awkward enunciations ("You are! To become! Geisha!"). Golden coyly framed his novel as a translated autobiography, and the author invented for his stereotypical model of Eastern femininity an accordingly docile voice. The movie at least drops any pretense of authenticity, supplanting the whispery "Asianness" of Golden's prose with the heavy breathing of a filmmaker who goes weak-kneed at the merest glimpse of silk brocade...
Sold into an okiya in childhood, mysteriously blue-eyed Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang), often shot through bars and slats in case we fail to grasp her caged condition, longs to escape servitude—to become! geisha!—which she does under the tutelage of the kindly Mameha (Michelle Yeoh) and despite the vengeful plotting of the slatternly Hatsumomo (Gong Li)...
In this back-lot Kyoto, which seems to have been achieved by plopping down some pointy Asian roofs on the set of Chicago, something is always falling from the sky: rain, snow, and on special occasions, cherry blossoms. The overall aesthetic could be approximated by turning on a wind machine in a Chinatown souvenir emporium. With Marshall preoccupied picking out fabrics and lacquer veneers, the task of directing the actors seems to have fallen to the beleaguered dialect coach. To complement the clashing accents, Memoirs is a free-for-all of wildly divergent acting styles. Zhang's phonetic struggles are the most (mis)pronounced, but she throws herself heartily into the film's hilariously anachronistic big number, a splashy expressionist routine on platform clogs that would have cleaned up on So You Think You Can Dance?...
But this review in the Village Voice? Hysterical, and almost made me want to see it in the theater.
"Chinese actresses play Japanese geisha (in a period concurrent with the Sino-Japanese war) and speak English the way Hollywood has always imagined Asians do, all stilted syntax and awkward enunciations ("You are! To become! Geisha!"). Golden coyly framed his novel as a translated autobiography, and the author invented for his stereotypical model of Eastern femininity an accordingly docile voice. The movie at least drops any pretense of authenticity, supplanting the whispery "Asianness" of Golden's prose with the heavy breathing of a filmmaker who goes weak-kneed at the merest glimpse of silk brocade...
Sold into an okiya in childhood, mysteriously blue-eyed Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang), often shot through bars and slats in case we fail to grasp her caged condition, longs to escape servitude—to become! geisha!—which she does under the tutelage of the kindly Mameha (Michelle Yeoh) and despite the vengeful plotting of the slatternly Hatsumomo (Gong Li)...
In this back-lot Kyoto, which seems to have been achieved by plopping down some pointy Asian roofs on the set of Chicago, something is always falling from the sky: rain, snow, and on special occasions, cherry blossoms. The overall aesthetic could be approximated by turning on a wind machine in a Chinatown souvenir emporium. With Marshall preoccupied picking out fabrics and lacquer veneers, the task of directing the actors seems to have fallen to the beleaguered dialect coach. To complement the clashing accents, Memoirs is a free-for-all of wildly divergent acting styles. Zhang's phonetic struggles are the most (mis)pronounced, but she throws herself heartily into the film's hilariously anachronistic big number, a splashy expressionist routine on platform clogs that would have cleaned up on So You Think You Can Dance?...
Best of all, Gong uncorks a broad, gestural performance that both captures the spirit of the movie and signals her superiority to it. Memoirs scans as round two in the battle of the Zhang Yimou leading ladies, carried over from 2046, and this bout also goes to Gong. Clad in chinchilla-fringed outfits and hurling sidelong death glares, Gong's viperous Hatsumomo wipes the floor with Zhang's cowering Sayuri: "I shall destroy you!" she hisses in the most Showgirls-like scene. What's more, she doesn't overstay her welcome. Hatsumomo's dramatic exit seems to sum up Gong's attitude toward the film: She torches the place and defiantly strides away from the smoldering wreckage."
Okay, that's a lot of quotes, but critic Dennis Lim does make it sound entertaining in a camp sort of way. If only somebody got pushed down the backstage stairs...
Okay, that's a lot of quotes, but critic Dennis Lim does make it sound entertaining in a camp sort of way. If only somebody got pushed down the backstage stairs...
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