BEFORE: I was going to go straight to "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", but then I realized that this was on my Netflix list, and I could drop it in here, it shares cast members with both "Mulan" and that other Chinese film. January is already an over-crowded month, but if I don't drop this one in here, I don't know when I'll be able to fit it in. So now Gong Li carries over from "Mulan" and I'm taking a slight detour to Japan before I finish things up in China.
THE PLOT: Nitta Sayuri reveals how she transcended her fishing-village roots and became one of Japan's most celebrated geisha.
AFTER: Oh, I just KNOW I'm going to get in trouble tonight over what I have to say. How do I know this? A couple years ago, maybe the October just before the pandemic, I took a few photos of people on the NYC subway, on their way to a Halloween party. No big deal, I take photos of costumed people all the time at NY Comic-Con, but this time there was one woman with make-up on, wearing a Japanese robe. So, naturally, when I tweeted the photo, I said the woman was dressed as a "geisha". Oh, the reaction this got on Twitter, with this person saying her robe wasn't cinched a certain way, so she couldn't be a geisha, another saying that her hair wasn't traditional, and anyway I was using "geisha" as a derogatory term, plus I must be racist just to call a woman in a Japanese robe a "geisha", when she clearly wasn't. Jeezus, lighten up, what SHOULD I have called her? "Japanese woman wearing a robe and face make-up, whose costume probably isn't very authentic, but she's just a teenager trying to have a good time on Halloween, so let's cut her a break"? Would THAT be a better name? And then I was the a-hole for taking her picture, calling her a "geisha" and thus exploiting her while also highlighting the sexist motifs of Japanese culture. Well, ex-CUSE ME!
Honestly, I don't know much about the geisha, I never really took the time to study Japanese culture to any extent, I know they used to perform the "tea ceremony" and act as hosts, but that's about it. I figured maybe I'd get some more understanding by watching this movie, but the film spends the first hour or so explaining what a geisha is NOT - she's not a courtesan, not a prostitute - rather than explaining what a geisha IS. I had to stop and look it up, the word sort of translates into English as "art maker", so that's what she does, besides pouring tea - she plays music, sings, paints I guess, and also practices the art of conversation with her male guests. Look, this is incredibly sexist, no matter how you look at it, but don't blame me, OK? I didn't make the rules back in pre-World War II Japan, this was a different time, and this is how their culture functioned, at least for a time.
The film follows a young girl named Chiyo as she and her sister are SOLD by her father and is brought by cart from a small fishing village to a geisha house in a Japanese city. Yes, apparently you could sell your kids back then, if you were hard up for money. Again, don't blame me, that was the system. Her sister is deemed more unattractive and is sent to work in a brothel - remember, geishas are NOT prostitutes - while Chiyo makes friends with another girl named Pumpkin, becomes the servant to a geisha named Hatsumomo, and begins a form of introductory geisha training. A lot of it seems to involved being taught how to properly move around, bow, carry plates and stuff - a bit like "The Karate Kid" here, minus the karate.
Hatsumomo tricks Chiyo into destroying the kimono of her geisha rival, and Chiyo gets punished for this, plus falls more deeply into debt, because it was an expensive kimono. Hmm, imagine that, the person sold as a slave has to work harder, and is unable to have any financial path to freedom. In other words, a slave. Chiyo tries to locate her sister so they can run away together, but she gets caught and this causes the "Mother" of the house to stop investing in her training. While out in the city and crying by a river, an older, well-dressed man buys her a dessert and gives Chiyo his handkerchief and some money - this inspires her to work harder to become a geisha, so she can grow up and meet this man again someday and become part of his life, even if it's just in some small way, to pour him tea or entertain him. Umm, hooray for feminism?
Years go by, and Pumpkin becomes a maiko (apprentice geisha) and Chiyo is taken under the wing of Mameha, that rival whose kimono she once destroyed. Mameha convinces Mother to restart Chiyo's training and promises to pay Mother back twice over in the future. As a maiko herself, Chiyo starts working the tea rooms, and sure enough, she meets that man who once gave her a shaved ice, he's a successful businessman, but he doesn't seem to notice her that much. His business partner, Nobu, however, starts to like her after she's hired to spend time with them and pretends to be interested in a sumo match. But remember, she's not a prostitute.
The next plot point of the film involves Chiyo (now named Sayuri) becoming a full geisha, and in order to do this, Mameha starts a bidding war for her mizuage, which is the right to take her virginity. Umm, how is she not a prostitute? The Baron and a guy named Dr. Crab (I was a bit disappointed that he was a human, and not a crab in a doctor's outfit) start bidding on her virginity, and one guy wants her so bad that he brings her a kimono and makes her change into it, while he watches. But again, she's not a prostitute? I'm starting to think that maybe she's a prostitute.
There are more complications in her story, but her geisha career is cut short by the start of World War II. The geisha houses are closed down, and the geisha girls are (for some reason) moved to Japanese cities that are also bomb targets. The film doesn't really explain this, if this is a part of the culture that they wanted to preserve, shouldn't the geishas be moved to cities that are NOT bomb targets? I don't know, move them out to the country or something, Japan has a countryside, right? Or if they want to move you to a city that's a bomb target, maybe don't go there, and just go somewhere else? I guess that's what happened, because the Chairman (the businessman she likes) does send her out to the sticks to work for a kimono maker. Maybe he does care about her after all - but after the war, Nobu finds her again, and asks for her help to impress an American colonel who could approve funding for their post-war business. OK, if by "impress" he meant "seduce" then I think by now Sayuri is totally a prostitute.
But it turns out that Nobu really cares for her, though he's got a funny way of showing it, by asking her to sleep with an American soldier just so his business deal will go through. Or, he could NOT do that, then she might know that he cares for her, just saying. Jeez, can these crazy mixed-up kids get any type of relationship right in pre- and post-war Japan? The system has been broken from the start, and the odds have been stacked against Sayuri in all kinds of ways, but then again, it IS a movie, so maybe some form of love wins out in the end, who can say?
Speaking of the odds being stacked against it, this movie got very mixed reviews, despite being based on a very popular best-selling novel. Part of the problem seems to have involved hiring a bunch of Chinese actors to play Japanese characters, and then asking them to say all of their lines in English. Yeah, I get that most Americans don't like to watch films with subtitles, but if this was the work-around, it's not a very good one. Plus, this film got a very bad reaction in China, it was banned by the government there, something about the film describing a particular Japanese soldier as a "war hero", plus the topic apparently brought up memories of that time that Japan captured a bunch of Chinese women and forced them to work as sex slaves for Japanese soldiers. And as I mentioned the other day, if your film doesn't play in China, good-bye international box office.
Also starring Zhang Ziyi (last seen in "Godzilla; King of the Monsters"), Ken Watanabe (ditto), Michelle Yeoh (last seen in "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings"), Tsai Chin (ditto), Koji Yakusho (last seen in "Babel"), Kaori Momoi (last seen in "Ghost in the Shell"), Yuki Kudo (last seen in "The Limits of Control"), Samantha Futerman (last seen in "Going the Distance"), Mako (last seen in "Seven Years in Tibet"), Elizabeth Sung (last seen in "Lethal Weapon 4"), Kotoko Kawamura, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (last heard in "Kubo and the Two Strings"), Kenneth Tsang (last seen in "Die Another Day"), Eugenia Yuan (last seen in "The Great Raid"), Karl Yune, Ted Levine (last seen in "Birth"), Paul Adelstein (last seen in "The Grifters"), Togo Igawa (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Randall Duk Kim (last seen in "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum"), Navia Nguyen, Faith Shin, Yoko Narahashi, Takayo Fischer (last seen in "Pacific Heights"), Nobu Matsuhisa, Suzuka Ohgo, Zoe Weizenbaum, Thomas Ikeda, and the voice of Shizuko Hoshi
RATING: 4 out of 10 rickshaws
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