The film portrays a very romantic time and subculture, and the story itself actually thrives on melodramatics, so histrionics are typically, perhaps even primarily forgivable, but not exactly consistently so, for there are some glaring superficialities to dramatics, as surely as there are certain superficialities to the fleshing out of depths to this melodrama. Well, actually, there is a potential for freshness that is sometimes well-explored, but when originality lapses, conventions fall in, and heavily, coming with generic dialogue and characterization, and a formulaic narrative that feels all the more predictable when storytelling takes melodramatic tropes. Really, I don't know if dragging is a tremendous issue, so, at the very least, the film is limp enough with its structuring to feel rather repetitious in its wandering along a path which is surprisingly lacking in scope, and a little less surprisingly a touch too familiar. To be a conceptual pseudo-epic whose interpretation is ultimately rather lacking in nuance, this film's runtime of just shy of two-and-a-half hours tends to outstay its welcome with various forms of excess in storytelling, at least enough to cause certain shifts in focus to jar, due to overdrawn focus on individual segments. Yeah, I prefer "Memoirs of the Gaysha" (Making that just once was more than enough, but forget y'all, I just had to), although this film is better than many are saying, which isn't to say that I don't subscribe to many of the complaints. Sure, it got as many Oscars as any film of 2005, but just about every film that won something tied for most Oscar wins that year, which is bogus, because "Brokeback Mountain" was robbed of that tie-breaking Best Picture win. Well, if Rotten Tomatoes could say nothing else about this film, it was that it's still better than its predecessor, yet "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" and this film remain startlingly popular, despite critical reception (Who would have thunk that we film critics wouldn't have had that big of an impact on general public opinion?). I was surprised enough to find that it took them just shy of a year to get this sequel enough, but this is hardly anything like "Diary of a Mad Black Woman", partly because geishas try to make themselves as white as possible, and largely because this film is actually good melodrama. Seriously though, this film is a fairly different project for Marshall, although, more than that, it is way different from its predecessor. Between the American jazz dancers of "Chicago" and the Italian crooners of "Nine", Rob Marshall paid a visit to Japan, and even there, all he did was see about their dancing industry, so he really is a "gaysha". Trippy how a Chinese woman is playing Japanese, but hey, Zhang Ziyi, that kind of profiling is what you get when you have Americans make a film like this. Rating: PG-13 (Some Sexual Content|Mature Subject Matter) Life is good for Sayuri, but World War II is about to disrupt the peace. After rigorous years of training, Chiyo becomes Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang), a geisha of incredible beauty and influence. There, she is forced into servitude, receiving nothing in return until the house's ruling hierarchy determines if she is of high enough quality to service the clientele - men who visit and pay for conversation, dance and song.
In the 1920s, 9-year-old Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo) gets sold to a geisha house.
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