How to be Gentlemen

This film, based on the novel by Arthur Golden, unfolds from the perspective of Chiyo (Zhang Ziyi), a girl who, at the age of nine, is sold to a geisha house in Kyoto in the early 1930s. Here, she learns that becoming a geisha can be the single path to wealth and independence for a woman. The head geisha of her house, however, Hatsumomo (Gong Li), is bitterly jealous of Chiyo and abuses her at every opportunity. Eventually Chiyo is taken under the wing of Hatsumomo's rival, Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), by far the most famous and successful geisha in their district. Under Mameha's tutelage, Chiyo becomes Sayuri, the most legendary geisha in the nation, skilled in all areas, from conversation to dance, and sought after by seemingly every man alive…except for the one whom she has secretly longed for since she began her training, The Chairman (Ken Watanabe) – a man who showed her kindness at a time when her view of the world had turned the most bleak. Now as World War II approaches, Japan stands at the brink of a new era and Sayuri must confront the possibility that history will leave all that she has worked for behind.

We’re all “cameramen” these days, but the more our YouTube opuses dominate everything from reality TV to the Paranormal Activity movies, the further we get from understanding cinematography as an artform. The elegant Jack Cardiff, a British painter, shooter and ace anecdote-teller (here captured near the end of his magnificent career), will always represent the finer, even fussier side of the lushness of movies. Martin Scorsese, one of this doc’s many articulate testifiers to the Technicolor expert’s importance, puts it well: “Maybe it’s because of where I came from,” Scorsese says, referring to his NYC mean streets. “Neorealism I had right around me. If I wanted to go to a movie, I wanted something…fantastical.”

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