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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
But "Memoirs" desperately needs the showman's touch. The picture was shot, gloriously, by Dion Beebe, also the D.P. of "Chicago" and the gorgeous-looking "Charlotte Gray." It features lots of mountain vistas and delicate foliage. But enough already with the pretty pictures: Instead of giving us just the choice ones, Beebe loads up on them as if they were cheap candy -- after all, he's got a lot of space to fill. The picture's editing is generous with its use of extra, saggy beats: At one point a character tells young Sayuri, who's desperate to find her lost sister, that she can't possibly visit every house in the geisha district. "Do you know how many there are? Look!" she says. We know what's coming next, and still we wait two seconds, maybe three, before we get a languorous, loving skyward pan, eventually -- it takes a while -- revealing gray rooftops stretching as far as the eye can see. Then a few more beats pass, just in case we'd like to start counting.
The actresses are shot almost as lovingly as those rooftops are, and with just about as much passion. Gong has the thankless role of the bitchy villainess, and while she brings some crisp dignity to it, it's still a flat part that's far beneath her gifts. Zhang fares better: Her face is expressive enough to distract us from the awkwardness of some of her lines. Yeoh is the best, and the most relaxed, of the three: Her character is principled and wise, the kind of figure who could easily come off as stiff and dull. But Yeoh is alert and open every moment; when she's on-screen, the movie comes as close as it will to feeling supple and free. She also has the movie's most absurd line, in which she prepares Sayuri to auction off her virginity -- "Did mother ever tell you about the eel and the cave?" -- and somehow, she survives it.
I suppose anyone who already loves these three actresses should be glad they found roles in a big Hollywood movie in the first place. And yet these performances are frustrating: Even at their best, there's something ornamental about them, as if the actresses weren't particularly comfortable in the roles. Worse yet, the trailers I saw in the months before the picture opened didn't even mention the actresses' names, ostensibly because they're not big stars in America. Apparently, all the public has to know is that the movie stars "real" Asian actresses and thus must be suitably authentic -- why even bother with names?
But their names do mean something, certainly in that tiny corner of the world known as Asia (and certainly to the Asian film devotees in this country). "Memoirs of a Geisha" has been marketed as if the movie itself had invented these stars, pulling them out of thin air, when in reality Yeoh and Gong have been starring in Asian pictures for nearly 20 years. Zhang, at 25 the youngest of the three, has already done superb work in pictures like "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers." Zhang and Gong gave astounding, and very different, performances for Wong Kar-wai this year, both of them in "2046" and Gong in "The Hand," Wong's episode in the omnibus film "Eros." What's more, mainstream American audiences are probably at least somewhat familiar with Yeoh and Zhang from
Watching "Memoirs of a Geisha," I felt disheartened that, even though these women are the movie's stars -- and at home, they probably can't walk down the street without being hounded for an autograph -- they still have the aura of novelty about them. The movie is set up to be a window into another culture, and if you can get past the fact that Sayuri's big dance-performance sequence resembles an outtake from "Showgirls," you may actually pick up a thing or two about about early 20th century geisha culture.
But what we're really getting is a fat dose of Hollywood culture. If you find "Memoirs of a Geisha" wearying, as I did, you may find yourself accused of being irredeemably Western, too accustomed to noisy car chases and toilet humor to be able to appreciate a Zen garden of a movie like this one. (A recent picture now in distribution limbo, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien's "Three Times," tells a very similar story at a similar pace, and yet every moment is emotionally vivid.) Slowness doesn't necessarily equal beauty or power or profundity, nor does it ensure an acceptable level of "Asianness." And in "Memoirs of a Geisha," it doesn't serve its stars, either. If a movie isn't wholly alive to actresses like these, it isn't alive.
