7

In Italy, the right recommendation will get you through the door, to the top of the class, and behind the scenes. Maddalena’s has got her this far, into the editing room (“Mr. Annovazzi told me to come and see you”), where a beautiful young girl lines up the screen tests, ready to take downstairs to Blasetti and the producers. Maddalena, in the process of pleading for one more favor (she wants to be hidden in the projection room to watch her daughter’s test) recognizes the girl. Wasn’t she in that courtyard summer movie? Sotto il sole di Roma? The girl’s face contorts, a mix of pride and dejection. In Italy, a woman is the looked-at-thing, until people tire of looking at her, at which point she is cut loose:

“I don’t make films anymore… I’m not an actress. They only hired me once or twice… as I was the type they needed. I even got my hopes up. And I lost my boyfriend and my job… I convinced myself I was so beautiful and so great, and yet I’m stuck here, doing the editing. Nobody called me, so I’m here.”

Maddalena is shocked, then calms herself. For Maddalena, the dream is the truth: “Surely it can’t be that way for everyone.” In the projection room, she watches, hidden in a corner. Maria’s film rolls. Her tiny face is elaborately painted. She wears the dress for which Maddalena received her bruises. Here are the men again, slouching in their chairs, making their decisions. But on the screen, Maria, stumbling over her words, begins to cry, then scream. A scream of real distress, of protest. The men, finding it very funny, set each other off in rounds of cruel laughter (“What a disaster!” “She’s a dwarf. Look!”), Annovazzi first among them.

A little later there is the sentimental neorealist ending: Maddalena nobly refuses the contract that is eventually offered to Maria (“I didn’t bring her into this world to amuse anyone. To her father and me she’s beautiful!”), an impossibility given her situation and the money involved. It would be pleasant to give oneself fully to this conclusion, and to the marital, erotic frisson that seems to spring up between Spartaco and Maddalena in the final frames, but a dusting of political idealism covers it. For he does not blame her and she needn’t explain herself, and as the moneymen go off with their tails between their legs, these two Romans collapse on the bed together (“This crazy wife of mine,” murmurs Spartaco as his hand reaches out, not to hit her this time, but to caress her) and hold on to each other for dear life. The vitality and mystery of a working-class marriage (hearing the voice of Burt Lancaster through the window, Maddalena, forgetting her worries for a moment, murmurs: “How simpatico he is!” Spartaco: “Now Maddalena, you really deserve a slap!” Maddalena: “What? Can’t I joke now?”) is not natural territory for Visconti, and the implied Marxist sentiment (They have nothing! But they need nothing!) is too smoothly sold.

Really the movie ends fifteen minutes earlier. Here where Maddalena covers her child’s eyes with a palm like a priest over the face of a dead man. Lowering Maria down to floor, she removes her entirely from view, out of that little chink of reflected illumination cast in this dark room by the light of the screen. There is still the power of refusal. There is still the possibility of removing the looked-at-thing from the gaze of those who care for nothing but its surface. Today? Tomorrow? Never! But Magnani’s own face stays where it is, oppressively close to us and to the camera, makeup free, wrinkled, bagged under the eyes, shadowed round the mouth, masculine and feminine in equal parts, a hawk nose splitting it down the middle, a different kind of challenge to the male gaze. How beautiful she is! Then she, too, turns away.

Twelve – AT THE MULTIPLEX, 2006

For a single season I reviewed movies. Each week the section editor gave me a couple of the mainstream releases to choose from. Occasionally, if there was space, I got to squeeze in a second title. No fancy stuff, no art movies, no foreign films and only one documentary. I wish this explained some of the enthusiasms recorded below but I don’t think it does. All I can say in my defense is if you’ve ever seen Date Movie, V for Vendetta starts to look like a masterpiece.

MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA

The opening scenes of Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha are washed in a gray blue light, the same light that is to be found in Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and the city shots of Marshall’s own Chicago. Back in the 1970s, Oscar hopefuls had a yellowy glow to their film stock; now the color of Oscar is mineral blue. Serendipitously, this is the exact same shade as the unusual eyes of our hero, young Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo), a nine-year-old Japanese girl from a poor fishing village. Chiyo’s mother is dying. In Japan, all is tumult: it is raining, the sea is crashing, the camera wobbles. A strange man arrives. Chiyo’s father is crying. He weeps for Chiyo and her elder sister, both of whom he has decided to sell to the strange man. He weeps for the 150 pages of the original novel now crowbarred into this four-minute sequence. A panpipe plays its melancholy tune of longing. This pipe was also in Titanic.

Soon, sooner than anyone could imagine, the girls are dropped off at an okiya, a house of repute (depending on whom you ask) where girls are taught to be geisha. The owners, Mother (Kaori Momoi) and Auntie (Tsai Chin), examine the sisters. One girl has lovely gray blue eyes. She can stay. The other does not. She must go and become a common prostitute on the other side of town. Chiyo, who is to become an uncommon prostitute, is therefore the fortunate one, and is shown her brand-new world by fellow trainee Pumpkin (Zoe Weizenbaum), as they climb up onto the roof and look out across miles of handsome gray blue CGI rooftops. These rooftops were also in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

In a musical, the form in which Rob Marshall, originally a choreographer, was trained, this would be the moment for a song. But there’s no time: five hundred pages of plot remain. So: downstairs in the okiya lurks the evil Hatsumomo (Gong Li), a violent, imperious, gorgeous young harridan who is here to make Chiyo’s life hell. She teaches our heroine an important lesson: old geisha, like Mother, are Japanese. Young geisha, like Hatsumomo, are Chinese and do not look like geisha but rather like willowy Vivienne Westwood models.

To escape the wrath of Hatsumomo, Chiyo wanders into the first of many ravishing street scenes, staged with all the indoor artifice of a Vincente Min nelli production. On a bridge, she comes across a dashing man in his forties called Chairman (Ken Watanabe). He is Japanese, as all men are. The nine-year-old Chiyo conceives a passion for Chairman that will outlast the film itself. Why she feels this way is unclear. Perhaps it is because he buys her an ice cone. She is decided: one day she will become a geisha so that she might be bought by the Chairman himself (thus becoming, in the coy terminology, her danna) and they can be together forever.

Sadly, things are not so easy: being Japanese, it is Chiyo’s fate to be a maid. Only after a number of vicious beatings at the hands of Hatsumomo does Chiyo finally get the message and grow up to be a bewitching Chinese actress (Ziyi Zhang). She is also in Crouching Tiger. Chiyo’s name is changed to Sayuri and she is taken under the wing of a successful geisha from another okiya called Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), who is neither Chinese nor Japanese but rather Malaysian. She is also in Crouching Tiger.

There has been a hoo-ha in Japan regarding the racial origins of these three geisha, much of which seemed to me a case of oversensitivity, until I found lurking within me the conviction that I, as an Englishwoman, can tell the difference between an Irishman and a Welshman at forty paces. I see how it must be galling, if you are Japanese, to look at three long-faced, high-cheekboned, patently not Japanese women and be told that they are Japanese. Although the Chinese, too, have cause for complaint: Ziyi Zhang, to Western eyes, is only slightly Chinese in the way that Lena Horne was slightly black.