Seduced by this fabulous geisha
A TRUE geisha can stop a man in his tracks with a single look. That’s what Michelle Yeoh tells her protegee, Ziyi Zhang, in the film Memoirs Of A Geisha.
Well, Rob Marshall’s breathtakingly beautiful epic of a
movie had me hooked long
before Ms Zhang blossoms
from a bedraggled waif into
a beautiful young woman.
Marshall has based his
movie, which has the
sweeping qualities of Titanic,
Gone With The Wind — and a
splash of All About Eve — on
Arthur Golden’s best- selling
novel. It’s the story of a nineyearold girl with strange,
pale eyes who is forced to
work at a geisha establishment in the Thirties. I confess, I never made much
headway with the book, but the movie totally seduced me.
Marshall won a best film Oscar with his picture Chicago (which featured Catherine Zeta- Jones and Renée Zellweger as two killer showgirls battling it out for the limelight), so he has an astute sense of how to handle the rivalry between Ms Zhang’s bewitching Sayuri and another geisha, the foul- tempered Hatsumomo ( played by Gong Li), who’s like a cat trapped between silk sheets.
Geishas are not courtesans, at least not in our sense of the word; they’re not wives — and they’re certainly not to be trifled with.
I must say I was shocked at how their virginity was auctioned to the highest bidder and how, essentially, they exist simply to serve men like slaves.
Memoirs Of A Geisha opens here on January 13 and it’s certainly going to be a major contender for Orange Bafta and Oscar nominations.