Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha might not have been quite the masterpiece that some critics labeled it at the time of its release, but it contained a rawer undercurrent which sits at odds with the saccharine romanticism found in Rob Marshall's 2005 adaptation, in which a predictable love story took the place of a considerably more nuanced exploration of life as a geisha in Japan. The radiant Zhang Ziyi plays Chiyo Sakamoto, the young girl plucked from her home and sold off by her family to be trained as a geisha. After years of tutoring she is given the name Sayuri, and before long finds herself up against rival geishas all determined to win the affection of the various noble men they're charged with entertaining, including Chairman Ken Iwamura. The film ends with Sayuri revealing her love for the Chairman as they kiss, embrace and stroll off arm in arm through a picture postcard traditional Japanese garden. That Golden himself wrote the screenplay under the alias Robin Swicord makes this sickly and twee happy ending all the more inexcusable - perhaps such a change from the more ambiguous ending of the novel, in which Sayuri departs for New York and opens up a tea house, lacked the idealistic romantic finale that mainstream audiences were no doubt expecting. Still, only the most hard-stomached of us managed to avoid gagging at the overly sentimental ending they went for.
