Misguided ‘Memoirs’

Shizumi Manale is kneeling in a sea of brilliant silk.

Yards and yards of costly hand-tinted and embroidered kimonos are spread before her on tatami mats. She has been unfolding them with devotional care; a flick of her wrists sends the fabric flowing across the floor.

Even to an inexpert eye, the craftsmanship is obvious: One kimono of subtly textured ink-black is bursting with bright chrysanthemums edged in gold thread. Others in pastel shades feature patterns with delicately blurred outlines, as if the images were rising up from under water.

Shizumi picks up a corner, fondling its rose-petal softness.

“You see – this is art,” she says quietly. “It really is like a living thing. It’s what we call the power of kimono.

“This is what Rob Marshall does not understand.”

The quality and style of the kimono is just one element of Japanese culture that Marshall overlooks in his film “Memoirs of a Geisha,” which opens nationwide today, Shizumi says.

The Osaka-raised dancer also faults the director for including inaccurate versions of traditional geisha dancing and for failing to convey the studied artistry that geisha embodied in the 1930s and ‘40s, when the film is set.

The movie “has nothing to do with geisha in Kyoto,” where Arthur Golden’s best-selling novel of the same name was set, Shizumi says.

“It’s very rude to us. To us, the world of geisha is our culture.”

Marshall also has been criticized for casting three Chinese actresses in leading roles as Japanese geishas.

Of course, this isn’t the first time complaints have been raised about Hollywood’s portrayal of a specific culture or time period. But for Shizumi and other Japanese artists who worked on the film, the disappointment at seeing their culture mishandled registers on a personal level.

Geisha life cuts close to the bone for Shizumi. When she was 15, she discovered a photo of her father and a geisha he had taken as his mistress. In a fit of shame and anger, she says, she tore it up.

Shizumi says her attitude toward geisha changed when she found out that the mother of a beloved great-aunt had been a geisha. Her curiosity piqued, Shizumi immersed herself in geisha history, eventually producing a documentary on the elusive women.

Geisha have been grievously misconstrued in the West, she says. They were never prostitutes, though love affairs did happen. Above all, geisha were artists and entertainers, valued for their ability “to make the atmosphere softer, not so tense” at the teahouses where the wealthiest businessmen went to unwind after work.

In his 1997 novel, the Cinderella story of a fisherman’s daughter who becomes a famous geisha, Golden did a fine job of capturing the details and rituals of geisha life, she says.

But though Shizumi praises the handsome settings of the film, she says it misses several key points.

In a scene of the geisha rehearsing a dance, the actors are wearing loose garments, “like a bathrobe.” And many of the formal kimonos look too flimsy, she adds, lacking heft and luxurious details.

Nor does the dancing reflect the stillness and subtlety of traditional geisha dance, she says – particularly the solo for the central character Sayuri, an apprentice geisha who dons eight-inch high zori (think lacquered platform flip-flops) and a thin white gown and whips herself into a frenzied expressionistic dance under a cascade of confetti.

Marshall, who directed “Chicago” to a best picture Oscar – and, for good or ill, pioneered making movie musicals without serious dancers in the lead roles – makes no apologies for his unorthodox approach in “Geisha.”

“It was never my intention to do a documentary version of the book,” he says by phone on his way to Rome for the film’s premiere there. “What was interesting was doing an impression of this world.”

He says his research was extensive: “I could write a thesis about the geisha world in great detail.”

And armed with the facts, he felt free to break a few rules. As in, for example, Sayuri’s solo dance.

“I serve the story,” Marshall says. “That’s my job. So dance needs to do more than it does in the book.”

Sayuri’s solo “needed to be an emotional dance and reflect her pain at not being able to express her love,” he says. “I needed to create a dance that will make us feel for her. That’s how it works.”

Choreographer John DeLuca, who worked with Marshall on “Chicago,” says it was those precarious wooden shoes, worn by courtesans (already a detail sure to inflame geisha purists), that inspired the dance: “I thought, ‘God, I’ve got to use those shoes.’ “

Shizumi flew to California for an interview as a dance consultant for the film, and was asked to audition for a dancing part. She wore her best summer-weight kimono to the audition and carried herself, she says, with the self-effacing grace that a true geisha might possess.

But she was alarmed by the speeded-up tempo of the music and the Broadway-style movement demands

“Can you throw the fan higher?” she was asked.

“We Japanese don’t do it that way,” she replied.

Eventually, she says, she was offered a part, but her mother fell ill and she felt she had to go to Japan.

The artistry of the time period is largely absent from the film, says Yoshiko Wada, a Berkeley, Calif.,-based textile expert who was an assistant to costume designer Colleen Atwood.

The geisha world “had so much to do with music, dance and textiles,” says Wada, who attended the Kyoto City University of Arts.

The kimono and the obi – the extraordinarily long, wide sash used to tie it – “was one of the most important things, showing their taste, their status in society, their age, everything,” she says. “… This film could have been made very opulent and meshed with that.”

But instead, she says, “they have kind of trashed it.”

Marshall says he used a similar approach to pre- and post-World War II Japan as he did with the 1920s setting for “Chicago.”

“Certainly in Chicago, women didn’t dance like that and didn’t dress like that,” he says.

By the same token, “Geisha” “is an impressionistic painting of the geisha world,” Marshall says.

Shizumi says she doesn’t mind that Marshall chose to construe a fictional geisha district. The error, she says, is in not making that clear to an audience who will likely walk away from the film thinking they have just seen how real geisha lived.

“My concern is, if they want to create an imaginary world they should have done it completely,” she says. Instead, the kimonos are almost traditional, but not quite. And the dancing is also almost-but-not-quite right.

“To me, it’s just sloppy,” she says. “The spirit of geisha is not there.

“In ‘The Last Samurai,’ many things were not accurate, but the spirit of the samurai was there. So I can appreciate it. But here you don’t get the spirit of the high-class geisha – the pride and elegance and … “

She pauses, searching for the words. She reflects on her lovely kimonos.

What was missing from the film, she says, was “the tranquillity of subtlety with beauty.”