July 17–24, 1997

movie shorts

The Pillow Book

Renowned for making highly aestheticized, mathematically precise and occasionally impenetrable films, Peter Greenaway has now come up with one that is, on its surface, replete with romance. At its most accessible level, The Pillow Book traces the psychic trajectory of Nagiko. As a child she's enchanted by her father's ritual of writing her name on her face, every year for her birthday, and her mother's reading to her from a 10th-century Japanese courtier's pillow book (basically a diary that lists, for instance, "things that make the heart beat faster"). The grown-up Nagiko (Vivian Wu) escapes from her arranged marriage to a "boorish sportsman," leaving her Kyoto home for Hong Kong to find her ideal partner, a calligrapher-lover. When she meets Jerome (Ewan McGregor), an English-born translator, her interest shifts: she becomes the writer (like her father) and Jerome's perfectly smooth body becomes the "paper." Like most of Greenaway's movies, this one takes some dire, even grotesque, turns, hitting the director's familiar themes (betrayal, justice, obsession and horrible death) and formal experiments (layered images, window-like inserts). Wu and McGregor are indeed lovely to look at (and spend much of their screentime naked), yet the film is caught up in more than a few cliches, including the "exotic Orient," la-la love montage, moral costs of decadence, and corporate bad guy (here, a publisher with whom Jerome has sex in order to secure a contract for Nagiko). Occasionally moving, always pretty, it also veers into pretentiousness, especially when it comes to Nagiko's aphoristic writing (for instance, "Closed eyes cannot read").

—Cindy Fuchs