Word: sayuri
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...MOVIE IS BETTER: By skipping the hometown beginnings of the heroine Sayuri and getting briskly to her induction into geisha life, the film announces its theme quickly and smartly. It expresses in winsome or searing glances what the novel took chapters to explain. The movie offers a little sympathy and backstory to the villainess Hatsumomo by giving her a scene with the lover whom geisha rules forbade her to have. And it gives Sayuri a fabulous dance scene that shows off director Rob Marshall's theater background...
...cast is a roster of A-list Asian actors. Ziyi Zhang, of the worldwide kung fu hits Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and House of Flying Daggers, plays Sayuri. Gong Li, mainland China's first international star, is Hatsumomo. Michelle Yeoh, another Crouching Tiger eminence, who was also a Bond girl (Tomorrow Never Dies), is Mameha. And Ken Watanabe, the Oscar-nominated warrior of The Last Samurai, is the Chairman...
...pauses, the looks of the characters, were all little moments of directorial authorship. The close-ups of the hands in pouring the tea. The shots of the geishas' kimono trains wriggling like the tail of a fish through a stream. Rob took the liquid metaphor of the water in Sayuri's eyes and created a river of images. It seemed to be planned by the heart. But it was planned. He had a picture in his mind, and he fought until the picture was on film...
Even in early films like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, Gong Li had a smoldering star quality. So a diva like Hatsumomo fits her like a cheongsam. She thinks she knows why her character is so mean to Sayuri. "In those days, a geisha could not have her own love," she says, speaking through an interpreter, "so she had a lover secretly. She's been deprived of her own love, her own feelings. She has great love and great hate. I thought she might have had the same kind of upbringing as Sayuri. She might have been beaten...
Tears were plentiful on the Geisha set. For Hatsumomo's final, incendiary face-off with Sayuri, Gong Li stayed on the set all day, crying, never getting out of character. Marshall recalls, with awe in his voice, that "hour after hour, as people worked around her, lighting and moving cable, she stood there weeping, because she couldn't leave that feeling. I've never seen anything like that in my life." After the actress filmed her last scene, she couldn't let go. "When Rob Marshall announced that I had wrapped my role and was leaving," she says...