I found the article! I mentioned before.
The quality and style of the kimono is just one element of Japanese culture that Marshall, director of the forthcoming film Memoirs of a Geisha, overlooks, Shizumi says. This 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 film, she says, "has nothing to do with geisha in Kyoto", the city where Arthur Golden's bestselling novel of the same name was set. "It's very rude to us. To us, the world of geisha is our culture." [color=#ff6666][/color]In his novel, 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, 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.
The Los Angeles-based musician Masakazu Yoshizawa is a veteran of the movie industry, having worked on the soundtracks of dozens of films, including The Last Samurai and Jurassic Park.
Working on Memoirs of a Geisha, he said, amounted to a series of arguments with Marshall, culminating in failed efforts to talk the director out of using aggressive, choppy music from northern Japan to set the tone for the cultured city of Kyoto, home of the most exclusive geisha.
The artistry of the period is largely absent from the film, says Yoshiko Wada, a 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 and curated a kimono exhibit at the Washington DC Textile Museum some years ago.
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... This film could have been made very opulent and meshed with that." But instead, she says, "they have kind of trashed it".
Shizumi says she doesn't mind that Marshall chose to construe a fictional geisha district. The error, she says, is in not making this clear to the audience, who will likely walk away from the film thinking they have just seen how real geisha lived.
"My concern is that 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," she says. "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 is missing from the film, she says, is "the tranquillity of subtlety with beauty".
The whole article:
http://living.scotsman.com/film.cfm?id=2458612005
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Memoirs of Geisha movie (Read 0 times)