(3 of 3)
Even in early films like Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern, Gong Li had a smoldering star quality. So a diva like Hatsumomo fits her like a cheongsam. She thinks she knows why her character is so mean to Sayuri. "In those days, a geisha could not have her own love," she says, speaking through an interpreter, "so she had a lover secretly. She's been deprived of her own love, her own feelings. She has great love and great hate. I thought she might have had the same kind of upbringing as Sayuri. She might have been beaten. Then she turned into a great geisha. I thought there must be someone like her in the world ..." The actress begins to cry, which makes the interpreter cry too.
Tears were plentiful on the Geisha set. For Hatsumomo's final, incendiary face-off with Sayuri, Gong Li stayed on the set all day, crying, never getting out of character. Marshall recalls, with awe in his voice, that "hour after hour, as people worked around her, lighting and moving cable, she stood there weeping, because she couldn't leave that feeling. I've never seen anything like that in my life." After the actress filmed her last scene, she couldn't let go. "When Rob Marshall announced that I had wrapped my role and was leaving," she says, "all of a sudden I just didn't know where to go." After the wrap she asked Marshall to go through the rooms of the geisha house set with her. They held hands, walking from room to room, never speaking.
Zhang says she too cried every day: "Playing her was my most emotional role." And Yeoh, in mock exasperation, says, "Everyone else got to cry. But Mameha couldn't. She was always in control. The mask was maintained the whole time. All my crying was off camera. After Rob would cut the scene, I'd have to go to the side to let it out." She credits Marshall with guiding the actors into a true ensemble. "He is very much like Mameha," she says. "He is playing a chess game. He knows all the moves and the countermoves. He planned it all out. I used to say to him, 'You're like silk and steel.' He has a very tough interior. But a director has to be that way."
A director has to be a chairman and a doctor, a lot of Mameha and a little Hatsumomo. And here, Marshall carries it off. "The very word geisha means artist," Mameha tells Chiyo. "And to be a geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art." That definition suits the film as well. Geisha is a geisha: a vibrant work of art that entertains us for a few hours, then disappears into the night, taking our beguiled hearts with it.