By Chi Tung
There are few things worse than seeing your favorite Asian men and women be subjected to the drone of the Hollywood factory. Actually, there are at least ten. APA counts down the reasons why Memoirs of a Geisha is such an abysmal failure.
10 things we hate about Memoirs of a Geisha
10) Not enough Gong Li
While Ziyi Zhang and her unremarkable Sayuri stammers and simpers her way to the top of the geisha food chain, Gong Li's Hatsumomo struts the catwalk in full vixen mode. By learning her lines phonetically, and with complete disregard for nuance and propriety, Gong Li steals every scene that she appears in, and has much more fun than the clearly outmatched Ziyi while doing so. Too bad she makes a rather hasty exit about two-thirds of the way into the film, sucking out any of Memoirs' unintentional brio in the process. Who knows -- if this had been the Gong Show, maybe we'd all be making lists of how memorable Memoirs of Geisha was instead.
9) The dance
Funny: even those who've panned Memoirs can't help but express their awe for the dance sequence, one which can be summarized thusly: Twitch. Convulse. Sprinkle some snow. Collapse. I'm no expert on the geisha's ceremonial dance, but I'm pretty sure it takes more than some fancy pyrotechnics to make. you. become. Geisha.
8) The music
John Williams + Yo-Yo Ma + Itzhak Perlman = unmitigated symphonic disaster.
7) The editing
Editing -- and its kissing cousin, pacing -- are clearly not meant to be showcased in a film like Memoirs. But how difficult would it have been to establish a more continuous rhythm throughout instead of haphazardly slapping on colors and images even RuPaul would find too gaudy? Apparently, not as hard as managing to be incoherent and insulting all at once.
6) The white man
No, this isn't another lambasting of poor Rob Marshall, but of the dreaded East-meets-West combo which occurs right when you think the ink on Memoirs is finally starting to dry. Fusion foods are, for the most part, quite dreadful, so what gave Marshall et al the bright idea to juxtapose stock white faces with stock yellow faces? Besides being pointless, the latter sequences in the film only serve to accentuate the troubling portrayal of the relationship between the dominant culture and the 'other.' Language becomes less a barrier and acts more as a cultural cleanser -- take one hard look at the compromised values of the geisha Pumpkin and you'll see what I mean.
5) The accents
"You. Shall. Become. Geisha." 'Nuff said.
4) Rob Marshall
Not to pick on the man who made Chicago a guilty triumph, but it's one thing to film vaudeville dance sequences and Richard Gere hamming it up. It's quite another to present the most watered-down, orientalist-smut aspects of a culture lovingly and irresponsibly. Linger on silk brocades and sartorial grandiloquence if that's your cup of tea -- just don't pass it off as another variation on the timeless "from rags to riches" story, and think that we won't notice that underneath it all, there's only more silk brocades and sartorial grandiloquence.
3) The love story
The yucky Lolita-esque undertones of the dynamic between the Chairman (Ken Watanabe) and Sayuri notwithstanding, there's little reason to get swept up in a romance that is dealt with so perfunctorily -- girl meets man who buys her snow cone. Girl falls in love. Girl becomes woman. Woman pines secretly for man who bought her snow cone. That the entire film never builds to any sort of crescendo, but instead distracts us with subplots plundered from Days of our Lives (catfights! Double entendres! Dance-offs!) is more or less confirmation that when it comes to showing, not telling, Marshall -- along with principals Ziyi Zhang and Ken Watanabe, in this film at least -- doesn't have a clue.
2) The screenplay
Having never read Arthur Golden's novel on which the film is based, I can't speak for the original's lack of craft, emotional honesty or cultural insights, all of which are noticeably absent in Marshall's version. Whether it's saddling Sayuri with instance after instance of torment, betrayal and multiple benefactors or making the concept of geisha as double-edged as a cotton swab, Marshall's screenplay flits and flutters without ever honing in on palatable storytelling techniques.
1) The conception
The time has now come to clean out some closets -- mainly, Hollywood's. It's interesting in this day and age that a film like Brokeback Mountain -- which is frank without being fawning of homosexual love -- can clean up come awards time and yet Memoirs, while frank and fawning for all the wrong reasons, is expected to contend with similar results. Before Marshall, there was Spielberg, who should know a thing or two about ethnic sensitivity -- see his Schindler's List or Munich. Instead, he drooled over the project for well over a decade, even stopping to make some casting calls along the way. That he enlisted the services of an Asian all-star cast is admirable; that he did so without considering Japanese actresses who might've played their parts more dutifully is not. It's a slippery slope when consigning responsibility to the leading women -- Ziyi Zhang, Gong Li and Michelle Yeoh were dealt a hand -- play to the Western audience's expectations of an exoticized East -- that for the sake of visibility, they could ill refuse. If all the world's a stage, they're merely the players. It's the industry that yells "Curtains!" while the rest of us sit there stone-faced and marvel that we can't see the strings.
Published: Thursday, December 22, 2005
