Many have criticised the cinematic release of Memoirs of a Geisha as one big sweeping generalisation about Asian culture. After all, it's an American production about a Japanese geisha starring Chinese actresses set in tatami rooms and cherry blossom gardens.
But aside from all that, I perceive something far more troubling about the film.
It's the very thing that holds the plot together that troubles me: the main character's love affair.
The film, directed by Rob Marshall, is based on Arthur Golden's novel by the same name, in which the character Sayuri unambiguously pronounces that she is 'becoming a geisha only to win the affections of the chairman'.
Sayuri - played by Zhang Ziyi - meets a man known only as 'the chairman' (Ken Watanabe) at the age of nine, and from then on is smitten by the much older figure. His handkerchief, which he hands her during their first encounter, becomes the object of Sayuri's adoration, symbolising all of her repressed emotion for him.
According to the novel, without her love for this man, Sayuri would never even have become a geisha. It appears that both the director and the writer took liberties in interpreting the life of this geisha.
The actual geisha that inspired Golden's novel, Mineko Iwasaki, related in her memoirs that it was art, not love, which kept her going year after year. Art was the reason she was able to devote her best years to such a career without a trace of regret.