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This is no fault of the actress herself, whose comeliness is as self-evident and insistent as the wafting cherry blossom and the orange lanterns floating on pellucid water, the sumptuous silk of the kimono and the trimmed perfection of the formal gardens-all of which we are repeatedly encouraged to appreciate until you begin to feel that if something ugly does not appear on-screen soon you might go quite out of your mind. Japanese sliding screens neatly reveal the various beauties, opening on one action and closing on another as formally as the red velvet curtains in a musical revue. But inauthenticity of this kind, so well placed in Chicago, is all to naught here. Without songs, without pleasure, without humor, all the artifice in the world goes to waste.
At times the film suffers from a lack of sufficient artifice: there is more white powder in Dangerous Liaisons than there is here, with each actress apparently following her own personal taste in the matter of geisha stylings. You can imagine the debate on set (“Oh, Rob… do we have to…?”). Ziyi Zhang is a good sport-ish; she’ll wear quite a bit of white paint but won’t black her eyebrows; Gong Li will wear a little, but she’s not having her hair in that ludicrous bouffant; Michelle Yeoh eschews the entire conceit and goes about in much the same makeup she wore for The World is Not Enough. Yet the merest Google search reveals that real geisha are square-jawed, ghost-faced, stocky women swathed in shapeless fabric and wearing six-inch clogs. In Geisha only the clogs remain. The kimono is nipped in at the waist and hugs the abdomen, the mad bud lip is gone, the big hair has been made small. Everything that makes geisha truly alien (and alienating) has been removed.
The plot pushes on: war arrives. The gray blue is back, and so is the wobbly camera. The okiya closes and we find Sayuri reduced to dyeing kimonos in a village far, far away that still does not look like Japan. An old client arrives. He wants to help her recreate the geisha glory days. An American general is in town who wants entertaining. They hatch a plan: “We’ll show the Americans just how hospitable we can be!” As a battle cry this lacks something, even as a substitute for “We’ll put the show on right here!” But so begins that convention beloved of the movies, especially movie musicals: the comeback. The plot turns one part 42nd Street to three parts Lethal Weapon, except this time the lethal weapon is a kimono. Mameha is dug up; she’s ru
In the end, it is poor plotting and not cultural inauthenticity that is the true problem here. Authenticity is not everything in cinema. (Who cared about the authenticity of culture and locale in Yentl? In Meet Me in St. Louis?) Memoirs of a Geisha hurts the heart and the brain with its crushing monotony, inert, subhuman dialogue (made more ridiculous by being spoken in English with a faux Japanese accent) and Marshall’s calculated attempt to sell us another Hollywood fairy tale of prostitution. This tale was also in Pretty Woman.
Marshall manages only one scene that dispenses with the fantasy. Sayuri is welcomed back to the okiya by Mother, having sold her virginity to the highest bidder. “Now you are a geisha!” crows Mother, but her eyes are wet. Sayuri’s gray blue eyes are dead. A noxious tradition continues. It is a beautiful scene. It makes the endless blossom look like scrub.
SHOPGIRL AND GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’
Mirabelle is not your average L.A. girl. She works in the glove department of Saks selling a product that nobody buys anymore. Actually, gloves are Mirabelle’s day job: she is an artist. However, due to a hefty student-loan debt, and a productivity rate of three etchings a year, Mirabelle has had to seek other employment. To her right, the disembodied arm of a ma
Nothing can prepare you for what comes next, not even reading the original Steve Martin novel: Ray Porter (Steve Martin himself) walks up to the glove counter and asks Mirabelle for a date. Steve Martin’s face. I can’t explain it. You have to see it. But whatever he has done to it, he does not look one day younger than he is. He has, however, succeeded in leaving himself only one facial expression: smug. No, that’s not fair. He also looks creepy. And yet the creepy, intrusive voice-over (also voiced by Martin) assures us: “Mirabelle sizes him up and no alarm bells ring.” Really? Not even the one that tolls: “He’s forty years older than me”? The voice-over continues: “She doesn’t ask the question foremost in her mind: why me?” Good point. Why would a successful man like Ray Porter wish to date twenty-four-year-old, exquisite, milky-ski
This film is not entirely delusional. It is selectively truthful. As far as May-to-December love stories are concerned, Steve Martin has made a quantum leap in male self-awareness. He understands that what happens between Ray and Mirabelle is fundamentally an exchange of services. Ray Porter wants an i
So we turn to Jeremy as Mirabelle’s only escape route, but the script has overwhelmingly stacked the odds against him. His lines are moronic, his clothes are foul. He is four or five inches shorter than Mirabelle. His late redemption (he reads a self-help book called How to Love a Woman and buys a white suit) ca