
Japan Times: Mark Schilling Review of "Sakuran"
How did "Memoirs of a Geisha" get it so drearily wrong -- and Mika Ninagawa's new film, "Sakuran," get it so gloriously right? Experts on geisha culture, as well as geisha themselves, slammed Rob Marshall's film for its inaccuracies in everything from obi patterns to Zhang Ziyi's glitzy solo dance...my main objection to the film was its phony exoticism, echoing the Hollywood films of the 1950s set in the "mysterious East," but with less of an excuse...Ninagawa, takes as her subject not the done-to-death geisha, but the Edo-era prostitutes of Yoshiwara...[She] dresses her actresses and decorates her sets in a theatrical riot of color, with a cheeky indifference to period fidelity...Did the whores, even the elite oiran, wear such fabulously glam kimonos every working night? I suspect the answer is a big, thundering "no" -- but I didn't mind the visual overload...Ninagawa sees her oiran as, not hapless victims of a cruel patriarchy or idealized figments of male erotic imaginations, but young women alive and whole, with desires, dreams and tastes immediately recognizable to their 21st Century peers...more...