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Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: 23 Jun 2011 08:58:48
Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)
1080p BluRay Rip | MKV | 1920 x 800 | x264 @ 17,1 Mbps | 02:25:08 | 20,6 Gb
Audio: English DTS-HD MA @ 1510 Kbps + 2 Commentary tracks | Subs: English, French, Spanish
Genre: Drama, Romance | Won 3 Oscars + 18 wins | USA

This film, based on the novel by Arthur Golden, unfolds from the perspective of Chiyo (Zhang Ziyi), a girl who, at the age of nine, is sold to a geisha house in Kyoto in the early 1930s. Here, she learns that becoming a geisha can be the single path to wealth and independence for a woman. The head geisha of her house, however, Hatsumomo (Gong Li), is bitterly jealous of Chiyo and abuses her at every opportunity. Eventually Chiyo is taken under the wing of Hatsumomo's rival, Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), by far the most famous and successful geisha in their district. Under Mameha's tutelage, Chiyo becomes Sayuri, the most legendary geisha in the nation, skilled in all areas, from conversation to dance, and sought after by seemingly every man alive…except for the one whom she has secretly longed for since she began her training, The Chairman (Ken Watanabe) – a man who showed her kindness at a time when her view of the world had turned the most bleak. Now as World War II approaches, Japan stands at the brink of a new era and Sayuri must confront the possibility that history will leave all that she has worked for behind.

IMDB

NB! All screenshots are Enlargeable!

"Memoirs of a Geisha" is a love story that remains tedious and distant from being an epic love story on scale with Casabalanca, Dr. Zhivago, or even Titanic…

The story follows one particular Japanese peasant girl whose father sends her and her sister to a famous geisha house… Her less attractive sister is sent away to a house of prostitution, and Chiyo is given domestic tasks until the time when she can be trained to be a geisha….

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

Naturally, the main appeal of the film is the glimpse into the true nature of the geisha… How a geisha becomes a pinnacle of elegance and class, a master of entertainment and a royal agent of many gentle graces, how she sells her skills and not her body, how she can be the keeper of traditional arts, and how she can stop a man in his tracks with only one look… Yet the film postulates that a geisha's ultimate goal is her debut as a flamboyant dancer, sell her virginity, and pride herself on being well paid for it…

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

The film's photography is outstanding, the music score is inventive, the editing is concise and timed perfectly, and Ziyi Zhang overflows with sensitivity, delicacy, and sensuality…

Zhang has "the sea in her eyes." She is fascinating as the lovely heroine, the tender mood of every man, the quality of being graceful, the gentlemen's companion enclosed by an ever-changing Japan towards the start of World War II… The apprentice courtesan stretches the limits of realism for her lifelong devotion to a mysterious wealthy benefactor whose kindness to Sayuri as a child left a lasting impression… Sayuri preferred not to insist on her affection, even when time and circumstance conspire to take her away from the man she loves for years at a time, and was subjected to dramatic situations by the rivalry between the opposing Geisha houses…

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

"Memoirs of a Geisha" does not submit all its secrets on first viewing; there are many layers of meaning and mystery to be seen again and again… Best of all, here is a movie that honors small acts of kindness as the most precious thing we can cherish forever… Marshall's film invited us into a hidden and fragile world of traditional arts and culture where agony and beauty live side by side…
IMDB Reviewer
Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

Memoirs Of A Geisha, the picture-book new film from Chicago director Rob Marshall doesn't pretend to be a complicated drama, but the source novel, Arthur Golden's best-selling 1997 potboiler, never had pretentions of depth either. Instead, both book and movie provide a lush, immaculately detailed and visually absorbing portrayal of a peculiarly Japanese world, that of the special class of paid female companions, artists, musicians and, to be blunt about it, chatteled sex workers: the geisha.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

The film opens with an almost silent sequence that highlights the considerable talents of young actress Suzuka Ohgo playing the frightened young Chiyo, taken from her impoverished family in 1929 and sold to a renowned geisha house in Kyoto. Here she is subjected to cruel treatment from the owner Mother (Kaori Momoi), who works the little girl to the bone, with Chiyo’s slavery made even more unbearable by the malignant attentions of Hatsumomo (Gong Li from Raise the Red Lantern). The reigning queen of the geisha house, Hatsumomo realises the threat the newcomer represents, not to her present, but to her inheritance, and cruelly engineers her isolation, especially from her only friend, Pumpkin (Youki Kudoh). She frames Chiyo for a minor crime, which leads to her being sold to Mameha (Michelle Yeoh, also from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), a beautiful geisha in her late thirties who is the companion of the Baron (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) and his friend, the wealthy Chairman (Ken Watanabe from The Last Samurai). With Mameha’s careful tutelage, the shy and withdrawn Chiyo becomes the radiant geisha Sayuri, the talk of the town and a famed entertainer. The girls have been carefully drilled to realise that love has no role in their new world; that these men are clients, not potential husbands. The distinction between these women and prostitutes, and the geisha and a wife is made clear, with politically motivated flattery replacing the honesty of romance. Nevertheless, Sayuri falls in love with the Chairman, always keeping his dropped handkerchief and a newspaper photograph in the folds of her kimono.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

The casting is excellent throughout, although there was some controversy about casting Chinese actresses in the lead roles of what is absolutely a Japanese story. Ken Wanatabe is the only Japanese actor in a major role. All I can add to the debate is the observation that whatever rivalries exist between nations today can’t inform how films are made, or for that matter, reviewed, and that far more troubling to me was that the film is made in in English, rather than Japanese. But subtitles would limit the box office potential of a film like this to a mass audience, so the occasionally indistinct and far less subtle lingua franca of international finance wins out in the end.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

Regardless of how she delivers her dialogue, Ziyi Zhang (House Of Flying Daggers) has the face of an angel, sometimes blank and serene but always filled with subtleties and tiny human gestures that add tremendous soul to her performance. For his part, Watanabe’s Chairman, representing an idealised concept of love for the innocent Sayuri (his dropped handkerchief becomes her prized possession) plays a storybook romantic ideal, capable, brave and kind. But their gradual coming together takes a back seat to Sayuri’s own coming of age, which, once achieved, leaves the remainder of the broadly drawn, essentially formulaic Cinderella melodrama with nowhere to go. Still, it is a lovely thing to look at, and sometimes that's enough.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

In one way, the painstaking approach to the first two-thirds of the film, the precise and painstaking recreation of this complicated world, is to be applauded; it’s slow unravelling setting a totally immersive, captivating tone. However, the film as a whole never recovers from the brutal intrusion of the Second World War and the subsequent occupation of Japan by the beer-swilling, skirt-chasing Americans. A subplot running through the film that highlights how these young women were cast against each other as rivals falls flat in it’s clumsy resolution, with the viewers attention taken more with where they are (and how gorgeous it all looks) rather than what they are saying to one another or what it means to Sayuri’s desperate love. Marshall has conjured up a lost world with considerable fluency, but the magic of the film is in it's recreations, almost alien in their exoticism, and not its uninvolving emotions.

Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

One of the primary reasons to recommend Memoirs is the beautifully composed, opulent imagery of rising Australian cinematographer Dion Beebe, who takes his inspiration from Japanese woodblock prints and the Shinto belief of Suijin, or water-worship, to create deep, graduated landscapes, swooping perspectives and moments of breathtaking visual poetry; like a sequence representing the end of the war, a stream running with what appears to be blood becomes images of Sayuri hand-washing a red obi. You won’t see a better-looking film this year, it’s a triumph of photography and production design and costuming, but once these images fade, you might be left wondering what happened to the story, which never achieves the same level of careful detail and, well, cinematic craftsmanship.
John, Confession of a Film Critic
Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)

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