apples of gold in settings of silver

Memoirs Of A Geisha

I hope this doesn't fall into the category of "movies I hope will be good but turn out crap". The feature article in Time magazine made a good point, that Memoirs isn't going to be an attempt to capture a historical moment in Japan; better to approach it as a drama, a fantasy. There's an ineffable sense that outsiders would never be able to capture what is true or real about a time, a culture, a practice, especially one so loaded and mysterious that of the geishas. Like, I liked "Lost in Translation" but it doesn't tell you much about the Japanese. But Memoirs is irritatingly outsider - it's directed by an American musical director (recently of Chicago fame) and the 3 leads are all ethnic Chinese. Well, we'll see.

Anyway, Zhang Ziyi is playing the lead, Sayuri if I'm not wrong. It's a classic Cinderella story. Michelle Yeoh plays her mentor-geisha, while Gong Li is the smouldering, jealous arch-rival. Wah. I think Maggie Cheung would have fit the mentor-role better, but Michelle Yeoh is beautiful too. The one thing that irritates me about Asian movies recently that are made by Westerners is how the Asian girls keep flicking around unbound, long black hair (cf: Fann Wong in Shanghai Knights and Ziyi in Memoirs). Cos, like, in Asian culture, to flick around unbound, long black hair means you've gone mad.

posted by Puz @ 4:34 PM