Distant Lands
'Geisha' and 'Narnia' take us to faraway cultures, real and unreal
By Andy Klein
Ah, the perils of adaptation! The most generally cited textbook example of how to do it is Gone with the Wind (1939), though, frankly, my dear, the accelerated pace of events in the second half verges on the ridiculous. (And, personally, I also don't give a damn.)
Arthur Golden's bestseller Memoirs of a Geisha shows up on the big screen, courtesy of Rob Marshall, whose only previous directorial effort, Chicago (2003), managed to win the Best Picture Oscar. The novel, which is (as the title suggests) all about Japanese culture, was written by a guy from Chattanooga - maybe he should have named his lead character Choo-Choo-San - and it is apparently in that spirit that Marshall has hired three Chinese actresses to play the female leads.
At the story's start, around 1929, young country girl Chiyo (Suzuki Ohgo) is sold by her ill, destitute mother to a geisha house in the big city. She is quickly booted out of the geisha training track and is relegated to helping around the house. Much of her misfortune is the result of her having inadvertently provoked the wrath of superstar geisha Hatsumomo (Gong Li), who is a nasty, petulant, arrogant, manipulative presence, even when unprovoked.
About 40 minutes into the film's 144 minutes, Chiyo looks up at the sky, and, by the time the camera tilts back down, several years have passed, and Chiyo, now named Sayuri, has grown up to be quite the spitting image of Ziyi Zhang (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers). Sayuri is rescued from a lifetime of servitude by not-quite-as-big-a-superstar geisha Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), who, for reasons that only become clear much later, decides to give her the Evelyn Wood Speed-Geisha-Training Course. Cue the training montage straight out of Rocky, except the music is better. And I'm sure Sylvester Stallone won't take offense when I suggest that Zhang is a tad cuter than he is.
The goal of this is to pit Sayuri against her longtime friend Pumpkin (Youki Kudoh), who has become Hatsumomo's protégé. It's clear that the two older women are playing out a longstanding rivalry through their younger surrogates. Mameha encourages Sayuri to play nice with the wealthy, but disfigured, Nobu (Koji Yahusho, who has starred in half the Japanese productions to be released stateside in the last five years). What complicates things is that Sayuri has been in love with Nobu's best friend, the Chairman (Ken Watanabe), since she was nine years old and he bought her a sno-cone.
The characters - as well as Sayuri's narration - keep pronouncing that being a geisha is nothing like being a prostitute. During the training montage, we hear, "We are not courtesans and not wives ... . We sell our skills, not our bodies ... . To be a geisha is to be a moving work of art" - which is reinforced by the plot up until we get to the point where Mameha decides to auction off Sayuri's cherry. Apparently that one little bit of pandering gets an exemption.
Mameha has Sayuri promote this with a public dance presentation, for which she apparently has hired a Broadway stage crew: Talk about your production values! Zhang trained as a dancer in real life, and anyone who has seen the drum dance in House of Flying Daggers will be disappointed at how Geisha fails to take advantage of her skills.
Much as in Gone with the Wind, the final act suffers from time compression, as well as some irritatingly awkward storytelling. There is an important fire ... the upshot of which is barely touched on: Was the building destroyed? Was anyone hurt? How does this affect the subsequent events? There are hints, which don't feel like they are deliberately ambiguous or mysterious so much as that they are remnants of cut scenes. Likewise, a very important character simply wanders off at the same time; the story structure demands that she reappear before the end or at least that we learn her fate. But when the closing credits arrive, we still haven't heard a peep. There are other similar bits of confusing storytelling, some of which results from accent-obscured dialogue.
As a whole, the film (or perhaps the underlying story) feels undercooked. The first third is way longer than is justified; the film doesn't begin to come alive until Zhang arrives, and doesn't fully come alive until Yeoh shows up. (Despite having a muted, non-action role, Yeoh brings energy to the screen, just as she does in her action films.) Even a hardened old cynic like me can get some emotional buzz off of Gone with the Wind, but nary a drop formed in my lachrymal glands during Geisha. It doesn't help a bit that the big romance that holds the story together has a distasteful Daddy Longlegs edge.
This week's other big adaptation - The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - represents Disney trying to play catchup with Warner's Harry Potter franchise. The Lion, etc. was the first book of C.S. Lewis's seven-volume fantasy to be published, though a later volume covers a previous part of the story. Lewis's fantasy may be overshadowed by the popularity of his buddy J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, but it is enough of a children's-literature standard that its author would surely have rated a front-page obit, had he not unfortuitously died on November 22, 1963.
The story coincidentally begins much like Memoirs of a Geisha, with the four Pevensie siblings being sent away from home by their mother to protect them from the German bombs devastating London. (For those of you who cut class during History, this would be World War II ... The Big One.) Given that this is a children's story, however, they aren't sold into servitude or prostitution, but are rather the guests of a mysterious Professor (Jim Broadbent) and his unpleasant housekeeper (Elizabeth Hawthorne).
One day, while playing Hide and Seek, Lucy (Georgie Henley), the youngest, hides in a large wardrobe in an otherwise empty room. Pushing as far back as she can, she doesn't hit the rear wall, but instead tumbles out into a snowy land called Narnia, ruled by a wicked witch (Tilda Swinton), who is trying to make her stranglehold permanent. When Lucy eventually brings her skeptical sibs to Narnia, it turns out that they are the fulfillment of a prophecy about the witch's fall. They have to team up with a CGI lion named Aslan (the instantly recognizable voice of Liam Neeson).
Under the direction of Shrek's Andrew Adamson, the film is reasonably diverting, though Lewis's plot (as realized here) strikes me as nowhere near as clever as Tolkien's or Potter creator J.K. Rowling's. Again, there is some sloppy storytelling: There's a big payoff where Aslan explains how he survives one challenge, because the witch misunderstood some particular magic rules. This might have been a satisfying moment if the film had bothered to establish the rules in the first place. As it is, the moment is simply annoying. V
Published: 12/08/2005
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