Candy Colored Courtesans

There were several films at this year's Berlinale that I never managed to catch up with, even though there were multiple opportunities to do so. Whether a case of simple intuition or lack of enthusiasm, these were titles that somehow fell short of being able to reel me in. One of those films was Sakuran, the debut feature from Japanese photographer Mika Ninagawa. Now that I've had the chance to see the film, I'm happy those 110 minutes were spent elsewhere. Based on a popular manga of the same name, Sakuran is set in the pleasure quarters of Edo-period Japan. It traces the ascension of Kiyoha from a street urchin sold to a brothel at a very young age, to her years as a hugely successful prostitute, to her finally becoming an oiran (highest-ranking courtesan.) On paper, Sakuran has so much going for it. Ms. Ninagawa is a talented photographer whose LaChapelle-like use of saturated color in her portrait and advertising work is remarkably effective. The film's lead, actress/model/singer Anna Tsuchiya, is quickly becoming one of Japan's finest young actresses; she stole the show in Kamikaze Girls, and was equally impressive in The Taste of Tea and Memories of Matsuko. Topping it off is the film's soundtrack, which was written and performed by Shiina Ringo, to my mind Japan's greatest female rock star. So what went wrong? Japanese cinema certainly has no shortage of films centered around prostitutes/courtesans/geishas, but few (if any) have been directed by a woman. Unlike the portrayal of prostitutes in the works of Suzuki, Imamura, or Mizoguchi (to name but a few), Ninagawa refuses to view them as an inevitable byproduct of a patriarchal society, nor are they merely fetishized objects of male desire. There's a three-dimensional quality to her characters that allows them to transcend the common stereotypes, resulting in 19th century working girls with 21st century sensibilities. Though it may be lacking in historical accuracy, its revisionist approach is a welcome departure from the usual (see: Memoirs of a Geisha). Ninagawa posits Kiyoha as a proto-feminist, and to that end I can understand why she decided to cast the gruff, raspy-voiced Anna Tsuchiya as the star courtesan. However, her rough-around-the-edges quality (which lent itself perfectly to her Yakuza-like biker role in Kamikaze Girls) is here too much of a distraction, and she's never quite convincing in the part. Equally stiff in both her layered kimonos as well as her performance, you keep expecting her to tear it all off, throw on a leather jacket, and ride off on a Harley. Ninagawa's desire to avoid cliché is admirable, but the casting of Tsuchiya, like the film's jazzy-rock score, is an anachronism that simply doesn't work. Kiyoha's pageant-like promenade down the street, set to a Shiina Ringo power ballad, has the feel of a truly awful music video. When Kiyoha first arrives at the brothel as a rebellious child, she is horrified by this world of women, and has no desire to be part of it. (A sequence of snap cuts set in a bathhouse consisting of about a hundred close-ups of breasts is unique, to say the least.) Her later success as a prostitute stems from her uncanny ability to fake it – to build a seemingly impenetrable wall around her emotions while at the same time mastering the movements and gestures that make her so popular with her samurai clientele. (An idea that's been done to death in everything from Crimes of Passion to Lizzie Borden's Working Girls.) From a young age Kiyoha has but one goal – to become an oiran, a position of supreme power, even if it is limited to the self-contained floating world she's spent most of her life in. Yet the riot grrrl spirit laid down in the film's first half all but vanishes in the second as Kiyoha realizes that all she needs is a good man to take her away from that place. Sure, true love is wonderful and all that, but in the context of the film it feels like a betrayal of everything that preceded it. Kiyoha learned at an early age how to work the system to her advantage, and though she bucks tradition at the end, the soppy romance comes off as a cheap and easy way out. The inconsistency of her character is what ultimately caused me to lost interest. One minute she's fighting and cursing and the next uttering lines like "The world is a vale of tears; there's nothing in it that doesn't bother me." Rebel, or 19th century emo-girl? Unsurprisingly, the film is gorgeous to look at, with Ninagawa successfully bringing her trademark rich, saturated primary colors to the screen, as well as incorporating one of her favorite photographic subjects – goldfish, which appear throughout the film. While in many cases the fish are clever bits of decoration (such as the crossbar of a tojii gate replaced with an aquarium full of them), they too often serve as obvious metaphor for the women in these brothels – forever on display in an enclosed space, but unable to survive outside of it. Yeah... Though some have drawn parallels to Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, Sakuran never succeeds in bridging the old and the new, or managing to maintain its contemporary twist on an age-old tale. The promise of the film's opening minutes, full of distinct inventiveness and quixotic energy, soon devolves into a by-the-numbers period piece with all the emotional pull of a televised serial drama.

Comments

[logboy]

well, count me as an anna tsuchiya fan for starters. here though, if it wasn't for her, it would have been too painful to watch... sakuran suffers from trying to cover all the varying aspects of the life of a geisha, but tries to do it within the body of popular entertainment; i suspect that it's a better representation of this life than other contemporary films about geisha, but not one of the better tales of the life that can be found in films, as you suggest also. it's neither continuously entertaining or artistic, deep. it's fantastically colorful, and yes it kind of works as something wild to look at, but it's a bit of a loss in the actual filmmaking and storytelling departments... it will probably have it's fans though, a la 'casshern' and otehr such photographer-turned-eyecandy-generator efforts of the past.

[Dottie]

And who is to say televised serial dramas lack emotional pull?

Wish you had focused more on the visuals in this review. Ninagawa is one of the better visual stylists out there. After all, cinema = image.