The Pillow Book

Peter Greenaway, UK/France/Netherlands 1996, 126 minutes

The Pillow Book is a quite stunning film. It is arguably the most accessible Greenaway film to date, taking a less than usual amount of concentration. It has a more straightforward plot and more recognisable characters whilst retaining the complex and beautiful visuals Greenaway is associated with. He never merely depicts a sequence of action but makes films to be watched several times in order to fully appreciate them. The pictorial detail and sheer art of The Pillow Book (reflecting Greenaway's initial career as a painter perhaps) make this a film not to be missed.

The plot sometimes seems secondary to the visuals but is itself, thoroughly engaging. Inspired by her father's calligraphy, family past and the 10thcentury Japanese Pillow Book, fashion model/calligrapher/artist Nagiko (Vivian Wu) seeks to follow in her father's path by striving to have her manuscripts published. She is intensely restless and passionate, driven to find a lover who is equally a calligrapher (using her body as the parchment). The lover she finds, Jerome (Ewan McGregor), complicates matters somewhat by having an affair with a publisher who previously had an affair with her father. The central relationship becomes distorted and eventually, tragically momentous.

Greenaway himself, in the original press release for the movie writes:

"There are two stimulations in life guaranteed to excite and tease - sex and text, flesh and literature."

The Pillow Book is an extraordinarily passionate piece of cinema, with the lovers and Nagiko's quest (for beauty and ultimately revenge), intertwining literature and sex through the medium of calligraphy and through the visuals of the film itself. Needless to say there is a lot of gloriously naked Ewan McGregor to behold, who spends most of the film unclothed.

The Pillow Book is a love story (albeit tragic) in part, but is at every stage, essentially concerned with the visualisation of Nagiko's passions using flashbacks, inserts and the sequences themselves. It is an intensely emotive film, harrowing and sensual in almost equal parts. And, despite the departure in terms of watchability, it is also essentially Greenaway.

Review by Melanie J Baker
Taken from EUFS Programme 1997-98