The Pillow Book
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Movie Reviews of The Pillow Book
Movie Review: Unique visual storytelling
Summary: 4 Stars
This is certainly a fascinating film with visual images that are unique and beautiful and disturbing. There are several highly interesting aspects to the film that I would like to explore in this review.
First, Peter Greenaway has the eyes of a visual artist. His attention to the odd detail is incredible and subtle. I found the film to be full of images that went beyond the story line and pentrated at an unconscious emotional level. The act of exploring the human body with a caligraphy brush, composing stories, poems, novels, autobiography is certainly a compelling image and concept. Isn't our life written on our bodies? Don't we read the bodies of those with whom we are intimate? Don't we in some way brand or stain the bodies of those whom we love and in turn are we not burned and molded by those who love us? From the corpses of a young lover wrapped in indigo paper, to baths in ancient urns, the an army of handsome Japanese nude men covered in caligraphy, the film floods you with images. The storyline, the text, is only part of the story - a point I wish that those who did not like this film would recognize.
Second, it is unique storytelling. Nagiko, a Japanese girl, adores here novelist father. She comes to understand however that he must submit to sodomy with his homosexual publisher to remain in print and prosperous. Nagiko marries and becomes an unhappy young bride. She runs away from her husband and Japan to Hong Kong where she eventually becomes a fashion model. She explores the concept of writing on the human body as her art form as she moves from lover to lover, experience to experience. She meets a handsome European translator, Jerome, and becomes fascinated with him once she learns he is the publisher's lover also. She seduces him and then gradually develops a plot of revenge against the publisher. Yet, she has met her sexual, artistic, intellectual, aethitic match in Jerome and they both know that their relationship is rare. She and Jerome plot to have her story read by the publisher while he is making love to Jerome and sees the caligraphy on Jerome's body. But this plot backfires terribly as Nagiko finds she can not bear the jealousy and she rejects Jerome. Jerome, the romantic, kills himself with a drug overdose. The publisher uncovers Jerome's body and has his skin turned into parchment so he can retain his lover in book form. Nagiko learns of this and wants the book, for Jerome's skin is her medium. Her revenge includes writing a series of tales of desire and experince on the bodies of handsome Japanese nude young men whom she sends to the publisher for publication. The publisher is captivated by the beauty of the work and the men and begins to publish her novels and poems. Yet in the end, Nagiko sends an assassin with the final chapter, the last of 12 books, who kills the publisher and retrieves the book composed of Jerome's skin. I dare you to find a more odd story than this!
This visual feast of the unconscious is not for everyone. It is only somewhat linear with flashbacks to Nagiko's childhood and sections from the Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon integrated throughout the film. Yet, the character of Nagiko, her cognitive association of writing with the body, made far more sense than many performance and conceptual artists in the art magazines.
I was left with one haunting line, spoken by the 10th century courtesan who wrote the original pillow book in the title who says at the end: "I have loved two things, literature and the body."
Movie Review: The Greatest Pleasures
Summary: 4 Stars
"The Pillow Book" is one of the most unusual films I've ever seen. Nagiko is the daughter of a calligrapher who develops a fetish for having people write on her. This leads her to want to become a published author using people's skin as the pages of her book. It's an unusual premise. As Nagiko, Vivian Wu is a driven and manipulative woman, willing to seduce at will to get what she wants. Some have labeled this film as erotic because of the great amount of nudity contained, but Peter Greenaway's aesthetic distance from his characters is great, resulting in a certain coldness or clinical eye with which he views the characters. Thus, it is not unusual to see reviewer reactions in which the nudity was not experienced as particularly moving or erotic; it just means that Greenaway's intention worked well. From Wales, Greenaway was trained as an artist; and his sense of the visual pervades this film. I particularly appreciated the way he overloads the visual information of the film by frequently having boxes within the frame showing another concurrent action or sometimes a flashback.
One of the original aspects of the film came for me when the first nude Japanese calligrapher runs around chasing Nagiko with a paintbrush. With a terrorist subplot, the police whisk in, swirl him away; and the film moves on. Ken Ogata as Nagiko's calligrapher father has a brief but intense appearance as does Hideko Yoshida as Nagiko's aunt. Yoshi Oida plays the gay publisher who ruins Nagiko's father and has a graphic relationship with a young expatriate Englishman named Jerome played by Ewan MacGregor. There are a lot of naked Asian and Caucasian men throughout the film, most appearing with writing on their bodies. Nagiko's books are quite creative. I particularly like the book of silence as the naked man stands there wordlessly until he sticks out his tongue upon which is written the brief message. Greenaway's cold eye toward the subjects is reflected as one of the books tumbles in the room revealing the last part of the anatomy that might usually remain hidden. MacGregor turns in a good performance hitting the highs of romance, a strange homosexual affair, and the final torture of rejection. While Greenaway employs about as much nudity as he did in telling Shakespeare's Tempest in "Prospero's Books," it does not seem to be the point of the film. Perhaps the point comes as we are told that two of the greatest pleasures are those of the written word and the flesh. Not much is made of the spiritual in this film; but it was with a mixed reaction that I viewed the Lord's Prayer painted on a naked Nagiko. This is a film for the more cinematically adventurous, but overall is a good viewing experience because it challenges how we view the world. Enjoy!
Movie Review: Challenging Greenaway film (barely) makes it to DVD
Summary: 4 Stars
Peter Greenaway is an extremely erudite and sophisticated (some say pretentious) artist. Unfortunately for the medium, he's nearly the only active, high-profile filmmaker whose work continues to push back the accepted boundaries of film. This film is quite different in many stylistic ways from prior Greenaway films, although it is structurally similar to all his films. Just as The Baby of Macon pairs with The Cook, The Theif, His Wife and Her Lover in their stagey motifs, Pillow Book pairs with Propero's Books not only in their obsession with writing, but with the use of innovative image composition techniques. It is these latter traits that make them two of the most important films of the last twenty years. Like all Greenaway films, they appeal only to audiences who are ready to accept a deeply idiosyncratic set of conventions as opposed to the usual Hollywood fare (drivel). (This is a roundabout way of saying that most Americans will not really enjoy this movie -- or any other Greenaway, or Fellini, or Bergman movie, or for that matter, any serious work of art -- because they "just want to be entertained".) I was lucky to see this film in the theater prior to acquiring the DVD. Those who weren't as lucky won't know what they missed. The picture on the DVD is savagely cropped. (It is NOT a pan-and-scan; it is simply cropped. Twelve to fifteen percent of the original film image is missing on each side of the video image.) The consequence of the cropping is that the elaborate compositions of overlapping digital images is wrecked, and many of the images look rather weird. On the other hand, the transfer is acceptable, and the film is watchable; because this is not mainstream cinema, we're lucky to have it on video at all! Even in its compromised form, this film is worth a hundred immaculately produced ephemeral Hollywood films. I strongly recommend planning on repeat viewings with a copy of the screenplay (all Greenaway screenplays are in-print): this work invites extended scrutiny and discussion.Movie Review: L ange vole ... l homme change
Summary: 4 Stars
The Pillow Book is about book lovers. You might think you are a book lover, but this film takes the concept, deconstructs it and takes it beyond your sensibilities Ð well my sensibilities, anyway. It pushes the envelope Ð and whatever the envelope ever was. Greenway is not for your standard pop-corn munching movie watcher. There is a shock or two, less than in The Cook. I will tell you that his storytelling is unique, operating on very quirky logic about love (although very poetic about parental love), vibrant in a celebration of perceived good provoking its world of nightmarish opposites. The characters are not very appealing spirits, but their motivations are interesting. This story is told in layers of images, the past folding on the present, reverence in battle with sacrilege, and life hiding in very stylized art. Moving images are appliqued over other movie frames. It is like opera. There are a lot of arias for the eyes and some beautifully haunting music for the ears. At times, like in an opera the images sing together. The erotic nature of the film is not just the nude bodies making love but the language and how it lives as a fetish and aspired toward immortality or mythology. My knowledge of Asian culture is very little, but The Pillow Book has indelibly taught me something, except I need to translate from the Japanese, the Chinese, the English, the Yiddish and the Greenway.Movie Review: An interesting and unique film
Summary: 4 Stars
After reading the previous review I had to post a review of this movie so that people will not be mislead. Although I am quite willing to admit my ignorance of Asian art, whether Chinese, Japanese or other, I think this movie can be enjoyed on its own terms. Although the Pillowbook was confusing and disjointed to me at times, it was also intriguing and beautiful. For the previous reviewer to claim that all the characters acted in a monotone is simply untrue. Vivian Wu gave a subtle, nuanced and deeply emotional performance, and Ewan McGregor was wonderful as Jerome. Far from acting in a monotone, McGregor played Jerome with an infectious sense of fun during the early stages of his and Nagiko's relationship. Later, when Nagiko rejects him, his agony is vividly expressed and quite palpable. Additionally, to reduce this subtle and intense movie to "a fetish for naked Asian men" is patently unfair. There is nudity in the film, (although primarily of Wu and McGregor, neither of whom is an Asian man), but it is very tastefully done and relevant to the plot. In conclusion I would recommend this film to anyone who enjoys subtle and visually beautiful films. However, if you require lot's of special effects, explosions and action in a film, this is not the movie for you.