Utter authenticity ... a scene from Barbet Schroeder's Inju, the Beast in the Shadow
Many in Japan are appalled by the way that westerners have portrayed geishas in movies. Apparently, Rob Marshall's Memoirs of a Geisha is considered the absolute nadir, not least because it cast a Chinese actress in one of the leading roles. "It is a real offence to them because they (the Japanese) are very proud of that heritage," says film-maker Barbet Schroeder. "The idea that someone comes along and doesn't even try to understand that heritage and hires Chinese people ..."
Schroeder (whose new Japanese-set thriller Inju, the Beast in the Shadow has just premiered at the Venice festival) was determined to portray geisha culture in his film as exactly as possible. With this in mind, in the run-up to production, he spent as much time meeting geishas as possible.
"Of course, before this movie, I couldn't afford to meet with a geisha because it is extremely difficult and expensive. They don't accept just anybody coming in," Schroeder (whose other credits include Reversal of Fortune, Single White Female and Terror's Advocate) notes. Apparently, the going rate for an evening in a geisha's company is between five and ten thousand dollars - more than even a filmmaker of Schroeder's stature can normally afford.
The first geisha Schroeder met was a 60-year-old who was running a teahouse in Kanzawa and instructing young would-be geishas. "She was interesting because she was not part of the central [geisha] tradition which is in Kyoto. She had ways that were a little different. She was very human, very simple and I could relate to her wonderfully although we were communicating through an interpreter."
Schroeder compares her to a Buddhist monk - "somebody with this wonderful presence in the moment, this wonderful smile. You feel it right away that she is somebody completely with you in the moment. She was past 60 but she was still beautiful, with an extreme elegance and a lightness in speaking. She talked about life and death but always with irony and lightness."
Put it to Schroeder that geishas are exploited and that they lead often forlorn lives (an impression that Mizoguchi's films certainly give) and the director demurs. "It is not really a sad life. It is a society of women who are in control of their destiny," Schroeder says. "These are people who are living cultural monuments."
Inju, the Beast in the Shadow is a bold but arguably misguided affair. Adapted from a novel by Edogawa Rampo (the Edgar Allan Poe of Japanese literature), it is pitched somewhere between a B-thriller and Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses. Corny plot twists, transgressive sex and self-reflexive asides about cinema sit side by side. Many in Venice found it preposterous and it was given a rough ride by the volatile Italian press. Nonetheless, there is one level on which it was beyond criticism. Schroeder is adamant that he has represented geisha culture (or, as the Japanese prefer to call it, "geiko" culture) in a way that no Japanese audience can find fault with.
