I’ve decided to catch up on a few movies this week. Start­ing with Mem­oirs of a Geisha.

Watched it last evening and must say that it was a com­pelling and beau­ti­fully made movie. Despite, some of its not so good reviews, I enjoyed the movie immensely.

The cin­e­matog­ra­phy was sheer visual poetry. Moments of grand melo­drama that will linger for a while — lit­tle Chiyo get­ting beaten and Mother increas­ing the vol­ume of the radio so as to drown her screams; Chiyo run­ning through that end­less cor­ri­dor after meet­ing the Chair­man; then as Sayuri, her help­less­ness and fear, when the old Baron tries to com­pro­mise her; the scene when Sayuri emerges on stage and per­forms this exquis­ite dance are some of them. Opu­lent cos­tumes of silk, beau­ti­ful kimonos and oh those huge shoes that the women wear : how on earth does any­one walk in them?

Those sweep­ing vis­tas : where did they find them? They soothe the eyes, as Aquadreamer com­mented. The Geisha dis­trict comes alive with nar­row lanes, tea-houses and the­atres, ornate tem­ples and crowded alley­ways. Those cherry blos­som trees, espe­cially the last scene where she walks to meet the Chair­man will remain embed­ded in my mem­ory for a while. And to think much of it was filmed in Cal­i­for­nia itself!

The child­hood sequences were a lit­tle long drawn though the young Sayuri (Chiyo as she was called, played by Koji Yakusho) did quite a com­mend­able job. Another actress who is worth watch­ing out for is Gong Li as Hat­sumomo, Sayuri’s arch rival. The Eng­lish was dif­fi­cult to under­stand in some parts. I have read the book ages ago so I didn’t really remem­ber much of the story. But I thought it was job well done to recre­ate an epic of this nature on screen.

Some inter­est­ing facts about the movie:
– The movie is adapted from a novel by Arthur Golden in 1997, which spent 2 years on The New York Times best-seller list, sold more than four mil­lion copies in Eng­lish, and has been trans­lated into 32 languages.

- Directed by Rob Mar­shall (of Chicago fame) and his crew cre­ated the film’s exotic and elab­o­rate world on three sound­stages in Los Ange­les and also con­structed an entire period geisha dis­trict, recre­at­ing ancient streets and even build­ing a ser­pen­tine river on a sprawl­ing ranch in Ven­tura County, California.

- In North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, the com­pany filmed at the Sacra­mento Rail­road Museum, in the streams of the Amer­i­can River in Cal­i­for­nia Gold Rush coun­try, and on rugged coastal cliffs.

- The pro­duc­tion con­tin­ued on to Japan to cap­ture authen­tic loca­tions. These sites included Kiyomizu-tera, a Bud­dhist tem­ple on stilts founded in 778 and rebuilt in 1633, and the Bud­dhist Yoshimine-tera, which dates back to 1029.

- One of the film’s final sequences (where Sayuri meets the Chair­man) was the still waters at the Shinto Heian Jingu shrine in the heart of Kyoto.

Worth watch­ing, if you haven’t already!