In a nightmare ride straight out of Dickens, the girls are trundled into Kyoto in the back of an open cart in pouring rain. The older sister, though still a child, is sold into prostitution, while Chiyo, by virtue of her beauty alone, is bought by a geisha house or okiya. So right away, you have a bad taste in your mouth. Sure, it’s another time and another culture, but no matter how we romanticize it, Memoirs is a film about the exploitation of women who are powerless to change their fates. Not a good start.

Just like Cinderella, Chiyo is worked relentlessly and treated cruelly by the okiya’s women. The owner of the okiya, Mother (Kaori Momoi), is a pipe-smoking, iron-fisted terror whose foul temper is dwarfed by the fits thrown by the psychotic head geisha, Hatsumomo (Gong Li). When Hatsumomo realizes Chiyo has hypnotic blue eyes, that unleashes a firestorm of pathological hatred and torture that we never quite understand until we realize the aging geisha senses an potential rival in the young beauty, child though she may be.

Rarely has feminine evil been portrayed so effectively on screen as here. Li’s Hatsumomo is a vicious, drunken, promiscuous witch with a “B” who gets away with near murder simply because she’s such a rare beauty, and her earnings support an entire house full of women.

We cringe for Chiyo as Hatsumomo orchestrates one dreadful punishment after another. When an attempted escape from her life of horrors ends with a broken arm, young Chiyo is comforted by The Chairman, (Ken Watanabe) a kind businessman who buys her a sweet ice. He gently wipes cherry syrup from Chiyo’s face with his monogrammed handkerchief, which he gives to the broken-hearted girl. It becomes a powerful token representing everything Chiyo aspires to become, and at that moment, she decides that being a geisha will somehow, some day bring her back to The Chairman.

Without explanation, Chiyo is sponsored by Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), another famous geisha. Mameha is kind but has her own agenda. She wants to unseat Hatsumomo as the leading geisha in Kyoto, and she’s grooming Chiyo as her chief weapon.
Chiyo soon morphs into Sayuri, (Ziyi Zhang) a geisha of such rare beauty she can stop traffic with a single glance. The tensions ratchet up until Hatsumomo has a psychotic episode and starts a fire that miraculously puts itself out without injury to the women who fought it with bare hands alone.

Golden’s book explored the delicate issue of Geisha sex. We’re told geishas are not prostitutes, simply entertainers and artists. But when a young girl’s virginity is auctioned off to the highest bidder, what else can we call it but prostitution? It’s even more horrifying when we realize the girl has no say in the matter whatsoever, and her “owners” can sell her to any lecherous old goat who ponies up the yen. Still, it's worth mentioning that the geisha Golden interviewed for the book sued him, saying her virginity was never auctioned off in the way he describes.

On the one hand, geishas were the most privileged and powerful of Japanese women, the most educated, the most celebrated and sought after. But what the movie doesn’t reveal is that these “shadow wives” with their elaborate makeup and costumes were in serious decline at the time of the movie, World War II. I also see it as a flaw that the movie so lightly skirts over the American occupation of Japan. Yes, I know this is a film about a love story and an ancient tradition, but you have to tell a story in context, and Memoirs doesn’t always do that.

Americans are represented by a lecherous officer who wants to get horizontal with Sayuri and a drooling, slack-jawed enlisted man goofing with a Kabuki mask souvenir. Ugly, indeed.

The film engendered serious controversy for casting Chinese actresses in a Japanese story. I think the casting was all about box office, but the sad thing is, the book has such a fervent following that the movie would have succeeded even with unknowns in the leading roles. Bottom line is...I do think Japanese actresses should have been cast. It seems racist and insensitive not to have done so. Japanese and Chinese people should not be considered interchangeable simply because both races are Asian. Follow that logic, and then Germans, French, Brits and Americans are all the same, too.

All that said, Memoirs is mesmerizing in places. Yo-Yo ma’s cello solos stitch together the scenes with the same power he employed in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Men may find it boring, but I found it as delicate and nuanced as one of the cherry blossoms that drifted almost continuously across the screen. You won’t be able to take your eyes off the screen, and after you leave the theatre, you may not be able to take your heart away from the story.



Recommended:
Yes