“Memories of a Geisha”
Recently, I watched a film, named “Memories of a Geisha”, which was rearranged by Arthur Golden’s homonymous novel. Visually, it is a film that was acted by Chinese and Japanese actors and actresses; however, everyone played in English. The story was simple and normal, which rounded a geisha’s life to describe. First, a little girl grew up and became a geisha. Then, she fell in love with the governor but lost virginity because of another man. Continuously, a war between Japan and America broke out and she gave up to be a geisha to hide in a countryside. Finally, when a girl became a woman, she encountered the governor again in the suburban.
This movie is controversial because the based novel is written by an American writer who just met a Japanese geisha once. So, the description should be considered with culture differences and unilateralism. In addition, most of the situations in the movie were played in America, seldom of them were taken in Tokyo and Kyoto. Therefore, Japanese academician seriously disagree the expression of geisha in the film. They think it is not true and it has bias toward Japanese culture. The heroine in this movie, also the real person in our surrounding, wrote another novel—the real memories of a geisha—to fight against “Memories of a Geisha”.
I understand the imbalance in Japanese. However, one thing I can get from the film is that a geisha is not a trollop. Especially in some point, they are artists. Zhang ziyi and Gong li also played two important roles in this movie and their performances were really excellent. I think every actors and actresses should have prepared confidently to deduct the part. So no matter how it becomes, we can treat it as an art. What I think is that sometimes a foreign field of view is a different way to understand a foreign culture. There is no right or wrong, just because everyone has a unique way to interpret life. As well as the movie “Kung Fu Panda”, we also find it is a kind of life.
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