Is progress possible in Hollywood? Obviously, no one dons Jolson blackface anymore (at least publicly), and Caucasian actors are no longer pancaked in Max Factor to portray Asian characters (though sadly this happy turn of events came too late to spare us Mickey Rooney's appalling performance in Breakfast at Tiffany's). But Hollywood is still rather club-footed when it comes to casting; how else to explain the drafting of Chinese actresses in a film about the lives of Japanese geishas, something that has rankled many?

From a strict business standpoint, though, one has to admit that Hollywood had little choice in the matter. The Chinese and Hong Kong cinema has been producing numerous excellent films, directors and performers over the last few years, while the once-mighty Japanese cinema has settled down to producing graphic horror flicks and imaginative anime (not to mention a profitable line of hentai). But the Japanese cinema hasn't been introducing actors that have caught the imagination of Westerners, as Toshiro Mifune, Isuzu Yamada and Kinuyo Tanaka once did. The three great Chinese actresses in Memoirs of a Geisha — Ziyi Zhang, Michelle Yeoh and Li Gong — are there because they've become marketable. The scandal isn't that they are playing Japanese, but that their talents are being squandered in a lumbering piece of cultural appropriation.

Based on the popular novel by Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha is a tale of the bickering back-street world of geishadom, a place where women often cruelly rule over other women within a larger male-dominated society. Rivalries develop between geisha houses, though the bitterest competition is usually found amongst geishas in the same household. What Golden knows of this world I cannot say. But if his book is anything like its film version, his world of Geishas seems to be part Shogun and part Dynasty.

The story concerns a young girl who is sold to a geisha house so that her poor father can afford medicine for her sick mother. The girl is rebellious, and seems to be on the fast track to becoming either the house's scullery maid or sinking into whoredom when a successful older geisha takes her under her wing, to transform her into one of the great geishas of their little corner of "the floating world."

Intrigue ensues when the girl, Sayuri Nitta (Ziyi Zhang), catches the baleful eye of her future rival and nemesis, Hatsumomo (Li Gong). But with the help of her mentor, Mameha (Michelle Yeoh), Sayuri will triumph, of course. In short, it's really Cinderella in kimonos.

The film is exquisitely shot, but no less so than any glossy coffee-table book of stereotypical Japanese scenes — elaborate tea ceremonies, impossibly arched bridges leading to Shinto shrines, etc. In fact, every frame seems to be invested with either eternally falling cherry blossoms or joss smoke. The only thing missing are shots of Mt. Fuji.

The dialogue that must be uttered by the film's good cast is routinely laughable. If the studio and director Rob Marshall scoured the Chinese world for their stars, they seem to have ransacked fortune cookie factories for the actors' lines: "Kindness we receive in our lives is not always enough," "It is too pretty a day to be unhappy," and the grammatically challenged "It is not for geisha to feel," which is only missing the prefix "Confucius say" and the ending of "numba one son." Otherwise, Warner Oland could have easily uttered it in something that might have been titled Charlie Chan at the Sumo Match.