A Powerful, Compelling Suffered Love

This sumptuous, gorgeous dramatic love story is one of the most potent ethnic love stories for Americans in many, many years. The entire movie is focused on forbidden love and the bearing the burden of such love in typical Japanese style. The performances are strong, the bitter emotional conflicts, the traditions, the elegance of the Geisha are well portrayed. In the best ethnic, soap operatic style of Japanese drama possible, this movie exposes the layers of stereotypical deprecation of a demanding and richly traditioned human art form - a girl as a living work of art and the suffering and sacrifice that attends to such a life. Unlike Dr. Zhivago, the epic Russian Revolutionary love story, Geisha spends all of its time on the people, and Suyuri in particular with the politics of men, of war only as historical canvas or backdrop. Instead the audience is witness to the intimate living experience and burden born by the mysterious Geisha and brings honor and human distinction to this noble but perhaps sexist and maybe dehumanizing traditional role in Japanese society. Easily among the top ten of my favorite movies of the year.