What's with the accent?

This movie is based off of the book, "Memoirs of a Geisha" by Arthur Golden, who originally wrote the book in English. Sayuri's narrating voice throughout the movie is the same as the voice in the book. Although, some of the details are different from the book, I thought the director did an excellent job of portraying Sayuri and the other characters. It was beneficial to me to watch some of the special features. This helped me to understand why they speak with the accent. Also, because of the diversity of the cast, the directors wanted a unified language that most of them at least understood. A couple of the characters, including Hatsumomo and young Chiyo, do not even speak English at all. Which I was amazed at because I could not tell that they had just memorized the lines. So, that is why they have an accent. Most of the characters in this movie are not Asian-American at all. Many are famous Chinese actors/actresses. Maybe the directors wanted some familiar faces in the movie, so that's why they are not all Japanese. However, I think that Ziyi Zhang did an excellent job at portraying Japanese mannerisms and her accent was very similar to a Japanese accent.

I was actually irritated by the accent as well. I don't know what accent is the real one but sometimes during the film I felt the actors were forcing themselves to much to speak with this certain accent that it became a liability.. Almost fell in love with Say-uri but her accent ruined it for me.

to my recollection no actor has spoken a language that isn't their native one fluently and correctly in a film. nicole kidman speaking russian ("birthday girl") and penelope cruz speaking italian ("non ti muovere") were pretty close though.

"they should give nicole kidman an oscar for being able to show any emotion after THAT much botox".

I agree. They should have all been dubbed either in fluent Japanese with subtitles or fluent English. This would have made this movie 10 times better.

I thought Michelle Yeoh did a far better job with her accent than the other two leads - they didn't quite pronounce some Japanese words correctly, whilst she seemed to at least make an attempt. I'd take a gander that it may have been due to the fact that she's quite well off as far as English is concerned.

I'm not sure how good Ziyi is with English, but Li Gong learned her lines phonetically, right? She was most probably prompted by a voice coach/interpreter who had anything but a Japanese accent.

Ziyi sounds like my dad's girlfriend, who's Chinese, heh. I'd say she was given the part due to being a fairly Internationally popular Asian actress, who was also quite adept at dancing.

Eh, the film looked and sounded pretty so I still enjoy it, even though the Japanese actors in the film were quite easily discernable from those that weren't, by look and sound alone. Kinda beating a dead horse though, I probably shouldn't contribute.

°¤«¸A lullaby to close your eyes¸»¤°

I read somewhere they actually had an open casting for Japanese actresses but none came so they eventually had to look elsewhere.

I didn't mind them speaking English - and I'm usually very particular about this. I don't think they were going for 'accented' English, that's how the actors spoke. For example Li Gong didn't, I understand, speak any English prior to this film. The same goes for the young actress playing Chiyo. As long as they're not speaking with an English or American accent or any accent that would seem out of place, I don't think it matters.

Should the entire film have been in Japanese? Yes, in an ideal world.


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