![]() Finally, I just never understood Li's machinations as Hatsumomo - she's so devious that she may as well be twirling a mustache, but she's never given any coherent motivation.ĭirector Rob Marshall rose to instant fame with his Best Picture Oscar winner And while I've liked Yeoh in just about everything else she's been in, here she is painted in such bland, broad strokes that she just fades into the art direction. The beautiful and talented Zhang does her best, but her Chiyo/Sayuri is such a doe-eyed innocent that she never comes off as more than a cipher. There is so much packed in to the story that the plot overwhelms all else and none of the film's three women are allowed to shine. Simply put, 'Memoirs of a Geisha' makes the same fatal mistake made by so many of the worst movie adaptations of great books - in attempting to pack 500-plus pages of dense narrative into two-and-a-half hours, it forgets that it was the book's three-dimensional rendering of its characters that made us care about its epic story in the first place. ![]() If this all sounds complicated, it is, and unfortunately it's to the film's detriment. Meanwhile, a rival geisha named Hatsumomo (Gong Li) becomes so jealous of Sayuri's imminent ascent to geisha mega-stardom that she'll do anything to get in the way, coming between Sayuri and her budding romances with both the handsome Chairman (Ken Watanabe), a charming businessman Sayuri has been in love with since childhood, and Nobu (Koji Yakusho), a former soldier badly wounded Within no time, the student seems poised overthrow the master, with Chiyo (now renamed Sayuri) threatening to unseat Memeha as Kyoto's reigning geisha. ![]() Sold into bondage by her widowed father, through a series of circumstances, Chiyo (Ziyi Zhang) eventually falls under the tutelage of Memeha (Michelle Yeoh), one of the most successful geishas in Kyoto. Based on the widely-acclaimed and best-selling 1997 novel by Arthur Golden, 'Memoirs of a Geisha' tells the sprawling tale of a Japanese girl named Chiyo.
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