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A pictorially and aurally creative, occasionally intoxicating film, Sakuran could be described as a native cultural and feminist riposte to the hopelessly Hollywood Memoirs of a Geisha, as it tells the story of a girl sold at a young age to a house of concubines and rises to become a sought-after courtesan. Sakuran tackles this story with a highly artificial visualisation that’s one part Vincent Minneli, one part ukiyo-e, and sports a soundtrack as aggressively cut-and-paste as that of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2005), being, perhaps not so coincidentally, another film made by a woman director which deals with a female protagonist entrapped by a highly formalised historical milieu. In both films, the approach resembles an assault on the niceties of the period genre, part and parcel with questioning the values of the period observed.
Adapted from Moyoco Anno’s manga by Yuki Tanada, Sakuran is the directorial debut of Mika Ninagawa, the daughter of a highly respected stage director, and her movie delights in its own gaudy artifice and often delirious employment of colour and design, channelling the stylisation of the comic with fidelity. Kiyoha (Anne Tsuchiya), the heroine, arrives in the House of the Chrysanthemums as a child, having been sold to them by her mother.
From the start she proves to be something of a handful for the managers of the house, and grows to be a hot-tempered, wilful star courtesan. When she falls in love with a weak-willed young aristocrat, she’s beaten and imprisoned, and soon finds he wasn’t worth the investment. Eventually, she finds a true soul-mate in a young man who, the son of an ex-prostitute, has also grown up in the house.
The film is dotted with marvellous moments, such as when Kiyoha ventures out of the doll-house to see her lover and immediately discerns by his reaction that he won’t stick by her. In another memorable bit, her chief rival attacks her artist lover in a moment of existential despair, accidentally cutting her own throat in the struggle, blood spurting in impressionistic smears.
However, Sakuran also suffers from extremely familiar plotting, an unpersuasive core romance, and its tale of a repressed but spirited heroine describes an overly-clichéd arc. As in the comics, Kiyoha is defined as a period Harajuku girl, defiant, almost punk in her bad manners and bad habits, but somehow she never really develops as an effective character in an effective drama. It builds to one of those non-finishes, where boy and girl run away together to face come what may, that I’ve come to really, really hate. The perfervid stylisation only comes on as boldly as necessary in fits and starts, and the tale positively ambles towards it conclusion. The excellent, witty musical score by Ringo Shiina helps drive along an interesting failure.