Hollywood's Faulty 'Memoirs'

Yet, as when Golden's book became a worldwide hit, a certain level of disgruntlement could be heard from Japan's geisha. A handful of current geisha offered widely quoted criticisms to the local and foreign press, expressing distaste for the movie's lack of precision, particularly regarding the dance scenes and kimonos.

To all but a small percentage of Japanese people, the world of the geisha is as unknown as it is to most foreigners. Many seem to view "Memoirs of a Geisha" as a sort of movie version of a California roll -- an American take on Japanese tradition that, while hardly authentic, doesn't taste all that bad.

To be sure, Hollywood has an especially bad record in terms of casting foreigners, says David Thomson, the author of several books about moviemaking, including "The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood." Take Anthony Quinn, of Irish and Mexican descent, who over his career played Arabs, Eskimos, Spaniards and Greeks. Or Omar Sharif, an Egyptian, who played a Russian in "Doctor Zhivago."

"In the old days, if you were a foreigner you could play any foreign part, but it's scandalous today," says Thomson. "What it means is that we haven't bothered to think about this character seriously."

However, Marshall sees himself as carrying on Hollywood's practice of "nontraditional" casting.

The examples he cites, coincidentally, are the same ones that Thomson brought up as representing an outmoded all-foreigners-are-alike approach: Quinn as "Zorba." And Sharif as a Russian.

"I cast the best actors for the roles," he says. "It's a very simple philosophy." Defending his hiring of Zhang to star as Sayuri, he says she has done "a whole hair campaign in Japan -- a big shampoo ad -- and that's nice, but honestly I only think about who can bring this character to life."

Marshall says he used a similar approach to pre- and post-World War II Japan as he did with the 1920s setting for "Chicago." "Certainly in Chicago, women didn't dance like that and didn't dress like that," he said.

By the same token, "Geisha" "is an impressionistic painting of the geisha world," Marshall says. "We took it a step further. As an artist, that's what I do."

Shizumi says she doesn't mind that Marshall chose to construe a fictional geisha district. The error, she says, is in not making that clear to an audience who will likely walk away from the film thinking they have just seen how real geisha lived.

"My concern is, 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 was missing from the film, she says, was "the tranquillity of subtlety with beauty."

Staff writer Anthony Faiola in Tokyo contributed to this article.