Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha, adapted from the
novel by Arthur Golden by Robin Swicord and Doug Wright, makes an
interesting companion piece to the new Pride and
Prejudice. Both movies take a story set in a very different
time and culture from our own, carefully remove all but the most
superficial and picturesque vestiges of that time and culture, and
give us the story stripped down to its emotional essentials. The
result is that both movies are stunning to look at while their
heroines — Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) and the geisha
Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang) — don’t quite convince us that they belong to
their ostensible time and place. Both look more (Ms. Knightley) or
less (Ms. Zhang) like modern girls dressing up. But the film-makers
in both cases are probably right to think that this is what
audiences prefer. Essentially, they are taking the remoteness of
the setting — Regency England in the case of Pride and
Prejudice, pre-war Japan in Memoirs of a Geisha — as
a kind of permission to indulge us in our guilty pleasure of
savoring an old-fashioned but now politically incorrect form of
romance.
In other words, the heroines of both films have excellent
excuses for not being the strong, independent, self-starting types
that women in movies with a contemporary setting are expected to be
and almost invariably are. They live under repressive patriarchal
systems which force them into dependency on men. Thus the age-old
paradigm, that of the fair and virtuous maiden who must wait in
hope for her prince to come and rescue her — of which never until
now have people grown tired — is briefly allowed out of its
feminist-inspired quarantine. It’s OK, it seems, if the romance is
all supposed to have happened a long time ago and in a different
world. Not coincidentally, both films include a ritual obeisance in
the feminists’ direction, briefly clucking their cinematic tongues
about how unjust and wrong it all was. And then they get on with
their retro-chic romances.
Geisha’s is even more retro than Pride’s
because its version of Prince Charming, played by Ken Watanabe, is
old enough to be the father of his lady-love, Sayuri. In fact, he
first encounters her when she is nine years old and buys her a
flavored ice in a scene which must seem slightly creepy to an age
so sensitized to pedophilia as ours. Sayuri, at this point known as
Chiyo and played by Suzuka Ohgo, is a poor and motherless child
sold by her father to a geisha house in Kyoto. Because she has
“eyes the color of rain,” she is spotted at once by the house’s
most celebrated geisha, Hatsumomo (Gong Li), as a potential rival
and quickly reduced to the status of slave with no hope of geisha
training. But her beauty and potential value to the house cannot
remain unnoticed forever, and as a teenager she is befriended by
another older geisha called Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), who turns her
into the most celebrated geisha of all. As it happens, there is a
precise measure of her success in the form of the price her
virginity brings when it is auctioned off for 15,000 yen — even
more than Hatsumomo’s brought years ago.
But through everything she treasures up her secret love for Mr.
Watanabe’s character, whom she knows only as “the Chairman.” When
she encounters him again, she is forced by Mameha to charm his
friend, Nobu (Koji Yakusho), who once saved the Chairman’s life
when they were soldiers together in Manchuria. This means that the
Chairman cannot become his friend’s rival in love, and it looks as
if Sayuri’s passion for him must forever remain unfulfilled. After
the war and Japan’s defeat, poverty and the end of the geisha’s way
of life only seem to drive her farther from her heart’s desire —
and then, when she unexpectedly encounters the chairman again, a
stunning act of betrayal seems to put an end to her hopes forever.
“It is not for a geisha to want,” she says in voiceover. She is
expected to entertain men by dancing and singing and pouring tea,
and by conversation, but “the rest is secret. No geisha can ever
hope for more.”
It is here that Memoirs of a Geisha parts company with
the new Pride and Prejudice. For although Jane Austen
portrays Elizabeth as being not only an attractive person but a
mistress of the feminine arts appropriate to her times, the film is
embarrassed by these and refuses to allow Elizabeth to charm us
with anything other than her beauty and spirit. Geisha, by
contrast, stresses those man-pleasing skills that were prized
during the period of the film’s setting, even though Sayuri’s
spectacular geisha dance appears to owe a lot more to Broadway —
Mr. Marshall’s previous film was Chicago — than it does
to actual geisha performances. Also, where Miss Knightley’s
Elizabeth is sold to us as a nature-girl with little or no interest
in the arts of feminine adornment, the geisha’s elaborate dress,
hair, and make-up remind us of a truth that it is now in rather
poor taste to mention, namely that “agony and beauty” go
together.
Both films, like the other Jane Austen novels — or Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs or Cinderella or
Sleeping Beauty or any number of other familiar romances
— make the same point in the end. It is that the girl who waits,
while remaining true to her heart, must eventually be rewarded.
Talk about the rest being secret! Better be careful who you say
that to. The only reason the feminist assertiveness
trainers aren’t all over this one is that poor Sayuri belongs to a
different world. “We don’t become geisha to pursue our own
destiny,” she reminds us in her lugubrious voiceover. “We become
geisha because we have no choice.” Not like us, eh? Nowadays, with
every girl free to pursue her own destiny, in love as in other
things, we find — well, actually we find that things aren’t all
that different, at least according to Maureen Dowd’s new book,
Are Men Necessary? That the myth of unlimited “choice” is
a cruel hoax may be one reason why, even today, people never seem
to tire of such old-fashioned romances as Memoirs of a
Geisha and Pride and Prejudice.
