Product Description

A Cinderella story set in a mysterious and exotic world, this stunning romantic epic shows how a house servant blossoms, against all odds, to become the most captivating geisha of her day.

"... a visually stunning adaptation of Arthur Golden's best-selling novel." (Barry Caine, OAKLAND TRIBUNE) The director of Chicago, Rob Marshall, transports us into a mysterious and exotic world that casts a potent spell. A Cinderella story like no other, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA stars Ziyi Zhang, Ken Watanabe, Michelle Yeoh and Gong Li. "Gorgeously photographed, meticulously directed and hypnotically acted. MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA is luxurious, ethereal and intoxicating. It will leave you breathless." (Rex Reed, NEW YORK OBSERVER)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6976 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2006-03-28
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
• Formats: Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Japanese
• Subtitled in: English, French
• Dubbed in: French
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 145 minutes

Amazon.com
Chicago director Rob Marshall's pretty but empty (or pretty empty) film has all the elements of an Oscar® contender: solid adaptation (from Arthur Golden's bestseller), beautiful locale, good acting, lush cinematography. But there's something missing at the heart, which leaves the viewer sucked in, then left completely detached from what's going on.

It's hard to find fault with the fascinating story, which traces a young girl's determination to free herself from the imprisonment of scullery maid to geisha, then from the imprisonment of geisha to a woman allowed to love. Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo), a young girl with curious blue eyes, is sold to a geisha house and doomed to pay off her debt as a cleaning girl until a stranger named The Chairman (Ken Watanabe) shows her kindness. She is inspired to work hard and become a geisha in order to be near the Chairman, with whom she has fallen in love. An experienced geisha (Michelle Yeoh) chooses to adopt her as an apprentice and to use as a pawn against her rival, the wicked, legendary Hatsumomo (Gong Li). Chiyo (played as an older woman by Ziyi Zhang), now renamed Sayuri, becomes the talk of the town, but as her path crosses again and again with the Chairman's, she finds the closer she gets to him the further away he seems. Her newfound "freedom" turns out to be trapping, as men are allowed to bid on everything from her time to her virginity.

Some controversy swirled around casting Chinese actresses in the three main Japanese roles, but Zhang, Yeoh and Gong in particular ably prove they're the best for the part. It's admirable that all the actors attempted to speak Japanese-accented English, but some of the dialogue will still prove difficult to understand; perhaps it contributes to some of the emotion feeling stilted. Geisha has all the ingredients of a sweeping, heartbreaking epic and follows the recipe to a T, but in the end it's all dressed up with no place to go.--Ellen A. Kim

On the DVD
Given the film's high number of technical Oscar nods, it's not surprising that the DVD's second disc contains a whopping 11 featurettes. Each one covers an aspect of Geisha's lavish production, from set decorations to costume design to musical score (all of which were nominated). Another documentary, entitled "Sayuri's Journey: From Book to Screen," covers the adaptation of Arthur Golden's bestselling novel, while "Geisha Boot Camp" shows the arduous training the actresses went through to inhabit the grace and delicacy of their characters (trivia: their on-set consultant is an American, the only foreigner ever to become a geisha). Also astonishing is footage of Ziyi Zhang learning to walk--much less dance--in 12-inch platform flip-flops for her showstopping "snow" number. The other featurettes range from the in-depth (a profile of director Rob Marshall, including his personal relationship with producing partner John DeLuca) to the baffling (an entire supplement devoted to sumo wrestling, which is only featured in one scene in the film, and sushi recipes from famed Chef Nobu, who makes a cameo appearance in Geisha).

Marshall also weighs in on a detailed feature commentary, one of two for the DVD. In it he defends his controversial choice to cast Chinese actresses ("It's about who's the best actress," he says, mentioning how the search for talented women who could also speak English and dance well was no small feat) and gushes over Gong Li's commitment to her role every time she appears onscreen. But his best behind-the-scenes tale is securing the right to shoot scenes at a Japanese temple because the head monk happened to be a big fan of Chicago. And all that jazz, indeed. --Ellen A. Kim

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, Brilliant and One of the Best Performances I've Seen in Years!
I'm not sure we're all seeing the same movie here. One comment I keep hearing is that the actresses did not perform well, and I cannot comprehend it. Ziyi Zhang especially gave one of the best performances I have seen in years, at least. Just look at her physically shaking during her last scene with Ken Watanabe. This complete giving over to the emotion of the character is nearly unsurpassed in anything I've seen in years, and I'm a huge cinemaphile. That's not to mention the flawless way she carried the postures and demeanor of the child star that played her young self through-out, giving a sense of consistency that I have almost never seen done this well. It's early impossible to remember that these two actresses are not really the same person with the way their performances meshed. So, maybe it's the reserved nature of Asian women, and the dualing of this nature with a sense of individuality and self-expression that people are interpreting as "not understanding the character"?
All I can say is, the cinematography and settings are gorgeous, as are the actresses (and what a stellar cast!), the performances are great (maybe the bar has been lowered so much lately that the degree of skill brought to the screen here is more than some people can handle). That's the only reason I can offer for the bad reactions I have heard.
The story is involving, and very realistic in terms of human nature. The romance is wonderful. There are flashes of humor and some of the script is pure poetry (and as a poet you can believe me on that!) I could go on all day, but let me just say this.
The movie is awesome, and the time flew by for me. It is not the over-wrought heart-rending sap that some may want it to be, but it is very true to the way most people behave, and especially in the reserved manner of the Japanese. In my book everyone involved in this deserves a huge round of kudos, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys beautiful things, and incredibly realized films.

Beautiful movie @}->---
Memoirs of a Geisha is a stunning movie. I haven't read the book, but now wish I had. The movie is close to 2 1/2 hours long, but the story and scenery are so captivating, it seems so much quicker. The costumes are fantastic and it's no wonder they are nominated for Oscars.
It tells the story of a little girl called Chiyo who along with her older sister, is sold by their father who has no money. The people who bought her, want to make her a geisha so she goes off to school but brings disgrace to herself and therefore they make her their slave. Upon chance, she meets a kind man who buys her a sweet cherry ice cone. She never forgets him and sees him again by chance some years later. Now she has hope and learns again (in a crash course) how to be a geisha and her new name is Sayuri.
The story that unfolds from there has ups and downs but the ending is so moving that of course I cried my head off. The setting is beautiful and it made me want to go and visit Japan. The music too is lovely and I hope they do get some Oscars next week because it's a very deserving movie. There is also a great performance by an actress called Li Gong who plays 'Queen Bitch' Hatsumomo and look for a small role played by Ted Levine who we normally see in a funny role as Captain Leland Stottlemeyer in Monk.
Beautiful move that you absolutely have to see. (Especially on the big screen if you still can).

The Inauthenticity Drove Me Nuts - 2 1/2 stars
I was quite taken with Golden's book, in spite of its Westernized love story and the blue-grey eyes he imposed on the main character to enhance her appeal to Western audiences. Rob Marshall, however, turned it into a glitzy inauthentic flick covered with Hollywood thumbprints.

I think the main reason it left me and various other reviewers cold was that Marshall and his production crew couldn't resist tinkering with the integrity of the book in order to put their own stamp on it (in one of the additional features, the choreography director admitted to playing fast and loose with the rules of classical Japanese dance in order to "find his own voice" in the movie's geisha dance sequences). Interestingly, except for the dance consultant and the make-up director, none of the key production people were Japanese, Japanese-American, or even Asian. Even the geisha consultant was an American anthropologist who'd spent a year in Japan living with and occasionally dressing as geisha. As a result, they Westernized the traditional geisha makup, gave the geisha actresses modern Western coiffures, and altered the style of the kimonos (yanked down the traditional lowered neckline at the nape of the neck to show half the actresses' backs) in an effort to turn the main characters into contemporary Americanized fashionistas.

Similarly, it was clear Marshall hired Gong Li and the female cast members of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" to play the principals because they had been well received by and were known to American audiences, never mind their appropriateness for the characters in "Geisha." In fact, in spite of their beauty and acting skills, they were wrong for these parts, not simply because using Chinese actresses was politically incorrect, but because the actresses in question simply did not inhabit their Japanese roles in an authentic way--they didn't really get under the skins of their characters. Michelle Yeoh, for instance, is an elegant and talented actress, but she looked and acted nothing like the 1930's geisha extrordinaire her character was supposed to be, rather, with her modern makeup job, French twist, subdued clothing, and completely non-Japanese looks she seemed more like a charming 40-something Chinese-American matron from Beverly Hills.

Similarly, Zhang Ziyi, was the picture of a pretty, childlike Chinese teenager--completely passive and obedient, nothing at all like the stunning sensation of the geisha world Sayuri became. As Gong Li's exceptional beauty was the most compatable with the traditional geisha look, her performance was the most plausible. It didn't help, though, that her hairdos were so weird, with hunks of hair hanging down even when she was in full geisha rig, and I don't know what Marshall was thinking in having her wander around the streets with her hair straggling down her back and her kimono half falling off, looking worse than the lowest class of prostitute. Despite her temper, Hatsumomo, as portrayed in the book, was a successful geisha. That she would have so blatantly risked her reputation by displaying herself in public as a [...] is entirely implausible.

But in my view the main problem in both maintaining authenticity and engaging the audience, was the stilted, awkward dialogue of the Asian cast. As I've lived in East Asia and have taught ESL in the region as well as in the US for many years, the effort to make the actors, many of whose English ability was limited if not nonexistant, speak fluent, sophisticated English made me cringe. The nonfluent actors were parroting sounds they had learned phonetically, and though they had been taught the meaning of what they were saying, they literally did not understand the words coming out of their mouths. Even those who spoke a little English were repeating words and grammar patterns that were completely unfamiliar to them. The unnaturalness of their speech was evident in its stiffness and it also showed up in the hesitancy and lack of conviction in their acting. The actress who played Mother, Ken Watanabe, and Gong Li were the worst offenders.

If the cast had been Japanese and the dialogue had been entirely in Japanese the actors would have had a much better chance of bringing their period characters to life. The movie could have been less of a stilted soap opera and more of a story of survival and identity within the exquisitely rigid confines of a lost "floating world." It's a shame the movie could not have had an Asian-American director with a sensitivity the culture and respect for authenticity Marshall & co. so glaringly lacked.