Notes on a Movie Trailer

Watching the trailer for Memoirs of a Geisha, two things came to mind.

One, is it not impressive that Ziyi Zhang, who spoke no English in her debut to American audiences (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) all the way up till her appearance in Rush Hour 2, is the star of a movie acted completely in the English language? This same woman appeared as a presenter at the MTV Movie Awards with Jackie Chan, barely able to comprehend what was going on and asking whispered questions in Mandarin to the multilingual Chan. Think of the reverse situation, with a Western actress gifted in accent mimicry -- say, Meryl Streep or, more contemporarily, Gwyneth Paltrow -- attempting to learn the Chinese language in a short enough period of time to make filming them acting in that language feasible. It wouldn't happen.

I think this demonstrates the relative ease of learning English over Chinese; spoken Chinese I'd hazard would take about three to four years to become fluent in, English obviously much faster. Zhang has put the work in, with her claimed "five hours" of study a day, but still, I don't know how convincing Paltrow might be if she had to master the tones and pronunciation of Mandarin, after a year or two of study. Then again, I could be completely wrong.

The second thing I noticed was that all three major female characters are played by Chinese women. At first, this struck me as exceedingly strange, since all the characters are obviously Japanese, being geishas in Japan. It was starting to raise my hackles a little -- "just another example of Hollywood confusing ethnicities!" -- when it occurred to me that Hollywood has never made much of an attempt at authenticity in this sense. Italians played by Jews, Polish characters played by Italians, Rwandans played by African-Americans. It's a rare occasion when a white character is cast solely on ethnic background, so I suppose it shouldn't be any different if they were East Asian?

Still, something seems off and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it says something about North America, where the strong divisons of ethnicity and language are lost, and a character is no longer British or Spanish or Armenian, but simply white. Still, even in the examples I think of, where ethnicity does become a factor, like the Polish dockworker Ziggy in The Wire played by James Ransone, an ethnically Italian actor, there is something unconvincing about their performances. Obviously, if one is able to make distinctions like Italian/Polish or Japanese/Chinese, these performances stand out negatively -- listening to Zhang's Mandarin-inflected English jars when I know very well how English is spoken by native Japanese speakers.

I suppose this does indeed circle back to a certain ignorance of the producers, and maybe their estimation of the audience: "we can't tell the difference, why would they be able to?" It may very well be open-minded and creative to put someone in a role designed for someone with completely different traits, depending on the nature of the production (gender reversal of characters in a modern staging of Macbeth perhaps?) but it's clearly not the case here. The thought process goes that the (relatively) big names are Chinese, we need big names to attract audiences, and Chinese people look pretty much like Japanese people. It's this line of reasoning that ensures that I'm sure is a definite contributor to the lack of progress in Hollywood film-making and its eventual demise, as people get sick of having their intelligence patronized.

Well, let's hope.