O Livro de Cabeceira

Anything by Greenaway is bound to be cinematic Art, but this effort is particularly brilliant.

It has full-frontal nudity, male and female -- not presented necessarily in sexual context, but you might want to pick your audience carefully. The nudity and homosexuality in the film are handled offhandedly and without prejudice, thus removing any hint of perversion or pornography. I know that sounds odd, but believe me, I'm a very conservative individual/artist.

But that's not The Film -- the plot is intriguing, the Art is breathtaking, and the calligraphy, ahhhhhhh, is astoundingly beautiful, especially when transcribed on human form. The vessel and the content are one -- how sublime of author and director.

My criticism? Sometimes Greenaway seems to think that we can simultaneously process all five lanes of the highway that run in his head. I, for one, am willing to watch his films twice. (Well, maybe not "The Falls").

Greenaway offers food for my soul -- I kiss both his eyes.

This is a beautiful movie visually, but you need to keep concentrating on what is happening. Don't ask why too much with this - the effect of actions is reason enough to take them. Vivan Wu is very good, as is Ewan McGregor, in a different role for him. It reminds you also of what are some of the best things about Japan, and what are some of the worst things about men. Well worth buying the DVD and watching over and over.

Like many of Peter Greenaway's movies, Pillow Book features extensive nudity. However, while the plot development is well worked out, the cast is competent, and Greenaway shows off a dazzling array of cinematic techniques, he always seems to approach his material too intellectually to really engage the viewer's emotions. I cannot know his intentions, but my impression is that he regards his scripts as more akin to a complex mathematical puzzle to be worked out than a story about real people with human feelings, leaving the movie worth watching but curiously cool and clinical rather than passionately erotic.

Just because a movie looks good, it does not mean it is good. Just because it is filled with erudition, it does not mean it has any cultural or artistic value. It must have something to say, and say it in a consistent manner. That is what distinguishes great art from phony art. "The pillow book" is not great art, it is not art at all. Its main subject is about writing on people's bodies. It insists on having a plot, although it seems to constantly remind us that it is not a conventional melodrama, but a pictorial essay. In fact it does not work either as a melodrama or as an abstract construction. Its meretricious efforts are a sad evidence of a certain "anything goes" quality that pervades much of the noncommercial post-60s cinema that bloomed amidst the disillusionment with the increasing infantilization of the Hollywood mainstream films. Madness, it is known, begets madness.

A difficult but beautiful film that treats of love, sex, betrayal, revenge, and a young woman's attempt to control her own creative process. Best understood as a visual diary (the "pillow book" of the title), but it does have a plot, if one pays close attention. Nagiko, the protagonist, struggles to become a writer through her relationships with three men who, in different ways, personify her muse: her late father, a writer; her father's publisher, who coerced her father into sex as the price of publication; and Jerome, the attractive young English translator who is the publisher's current lover and her own. This film will repay multiple viewings, however fractured its treatment of Japanese language and culture.