In her first feature film, Sakuran, photographer-turned-director Ninagawa Mika takes as her subject not the done-to-death geisha, but the oiran (high-class prostitutes) of Edo-era (1600-1867) Yoshiwara, the nightlife district that served as an emporium of the flesh for everyone from elite samurai to working-class Taros for hundreds of years.
Ninagawa dresses her actresses and decorates her sets in a theatrical riot of color, with a cheeky indifference to period fidelity. Did the bordellos of the time feature those gorgeously extravagant flower arrangements? Did the whores, even the elite oiran, wear such fabulously glam kimonos every working night? The answer is a big, thundering "no" - but Ninagawa has her reasons.
Unlike Rob Marshall, who imposed a romanticized Western (or rather Broadway) template over his geisha in Memoirs Of A Geisha, Ninagawa sees her oiran as, not hapless victims of a cruel patriarchy or idealized figments of male erotic imaginations, but young women alive and whole, with desires, dreams and tastes immediately recognizable to their 21st Century peers. Also, she is not a slipshod curator of dusty cultural artifacts, but a sui generis artist who flamboyantly but perceptively re-imagines the era. Her Yoshiwara may be more highly colored than the real thing, but it vividly expresses the glamour and beauty at the heart of the place's appeal, while exposing its everyday realities, from the trivial to the tragic.
Her heroine is Kiyoha (Tsuchiya Anna), who was brought to Yoshiwara while still a child - and hated it. She tried to escape the brothel at every opportunity, but was always brought back by Seiji (Ando Masanobu), the brothel's relentless-but-sympathetic bancho (chief clerk).
Kiyoha chafes under the supervision of Shohi (Miho Kanno), a canny oiran who looks down on her an as an untutored peasant, but she finally decides to become an oiran herself. As one of Yoshiwara's elite, she will command enormous sums for her favors and perhaps, like Shohi, leave on the arm of a rich danna (patron). That, she knows, is her only possible avenue of escape.
At the age of 17, Kiyoha takes her first customer, a kindly old patron of the brothel's top oiran, the arrogant Takao (Kimura Yoshino). Then she falls in love with the young, sensitive Sojiro (Narimiya Hiroki) - and lets her various masks (tough cookie, polished pro) slip. In doing so, she risks ruin. In a business that sells the illusion of love, the real thing is the most dangerous emotion of all.
She also incurs the jealousy of Takao when one of the oiran's patrons, the painter Mitsunobu (Nagase Masatoshi), begins to show an interest in her.
Despite the romance and rivalry, Kiyoha becomes an oiran, gets a new name - Higurashi - and becomes a Yoshiwara star. Finally, a rich samurai (Shiina Kippei) appears as the danna who will set her free. By now, however, she is like the fish in the brothel's aquariums - a creature of her enclosed, protected environment. Has freedom come too late?
As Kiyoha/Higurashi, Tsuchiya Anna dominates the screen with a swaggering verve reminiscent of her biker girl in Kamikaze Girls (Shimotsuma Monogatari), but with flashes of a previously unseen vulnerability. She also makes no attempt to play the period - or rather ape period drama cliches, and thus comes across as totally authentic.
Perfectly expressing the film's old-is-new vision is the soundtrack by pop diva Shiina Ringo that swings ferociously in an eclectic mix of jazz, pop and other idioms. It's 180 degrees removed from the fakey "Japanesque" sounds of Memoirs Of A Geisha - just like Sakuran itself.