The Pillow Book (1997)

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Miller Analogy Test: Occasionally cold is to Antarctica as Occasionally obsessional is to Peter Greenaway. This film goes way beyond being a study in art form and the blending of body and calligraphy -- the detour into Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder-land morphs into a permanent trip to the insane asylum. Let's consider the repetitive elements: Body calligraphy starting from the first scene that reoccurs year by year, and later in more modern life, day-by-day; the picture-in-picture techniques; the subtitled translations; the various books that appear in many guises. This is fractal film making where the larger image is actually repeated copies in ever smaller form without boundaries, without any consideration outside of art, form, and the pure expression of sensuality (in all senses, but particularly vision and touch). // I suspect I'm one of the few people giving this movie a mid-rating. Except to observe a tour-de-force of a singular obsession, I can't imagine why one would voluntarily see the whole movie.

This is a very strange film about a young girl whose writer father writes on her as a child and each year on her birthday. This becomes an obsession for her as an adult and she chooses her lovers by their calligraphy skills. She falls for Ewan McGregor who happens to work for the same publisher who, as a child, she saw violate her father in return for publication.The film follows her journey through life until she is able to have the publisher killed after his final sin, of skinning McGregor who having offended her by sleeping too long with the Publisher accidentally kills himself trying to make a dramatic gesture to gain her forgiveness.The film has a lot of split screens and used miniature screens to contrast past with pleasant and black and white with colour. There is no consistency to this technique and sometimes the past is in colour sometimes black and white, sometimes the past is the main picture and sometimes the miniature. Song lyrics in French periodically scroll across as subtitles in calligraphic script. These techniques were clearly meant to add to the sensuous feel of the movie but for me they were clumsy and confusing.I disliked this film for its pace, its fiddly techniques and its reliance on nudity to buy it out of jail. All of them failed. Finally if you are going to use a Chinese actress instead of a Japanese then at least choose a good one there are plenty.

Definitely check this one out....a little slow and ponderous at times, but the visuals more than make up for it. Beautiful visuals reminded me a lot of artist Ann Hamilton and some of her installation pieces. There is also some really innovative cinematography like the use of screens within screens displaying different moments of the same scene in time or in different historical periods. The historical scenes are also lushly photographed and amazing costumes as well. If anything else, Ewan McGregor is full frontal naked for a majority of the second half....that alone makes it worth seeing this movie. WOO HOO! Talk about being well endowed!

I had to push through the crowds on the sidewalk coming in and out of "Batman & Robin" to get to be one of four people in the theater to see "Pillow Book" - and two left during the movie. This was my first Peter Greenaway movie and OK so I went to see ALL of Ewan Macgregor but it had other rewards.It's in three parts: the first is the complicated set-up to the story line. The projectionist screwed up the first five minutes so it took awhile to figure out what was going on. Turns out Greenaway is primarily a visual artist; nice to see the cinematic techniques from the 1964/5 World's Fair finally being turned into an artistic purpose (other than the Woodstock movie). A theme is given at the end of the first third, roughly "There are 2 pleasures in life: those of the flesh and those of literature." And this combines them. However, as a visual artist he shrugs at the different definitions of "writing" - it's immaterial to him whether one means an author, a translator or a calligrapher, tho he scorns a "scribbler". The second part is Plot Central and Ewen is more insouciant and spirited than any other character to give the story life (though I had to laugh at the idea that he was a Yiddish translator), certainly more than the other living canvases (including the lead actress who was chosen less for her one-note acting than her willingness to be frequently nude one suspects). Also the nude bodies were chosen to be good calligraphic canvases and not to be distractingly erotic or well-toned so do just become background (only a British director would do that).The third part is the gripper - turning the movie into Mythic Story and raising it several notches of visual images and themes. What was more disturbing, however, is Greenaway buying into the Mysterious Orient. I do think we're hundreds of years overdue to stop this stereotype already. Was Japanese then chosen for the beauty of the calligraphy - or just so that Western audiences wouldn't be distracted by reading the words instead of soaking in images? Therefore is the movie a different experience for someone who can actually read the lettering? Let alone a non-English, non-Japanese reading audience. There's some bias intrinsic there. Why not use Latin? Arabic? Not everything is subtitled as the subtitle experience is part of the visual theme, such as when the gorgeous French song done over the love scene is only subtitled in French (I couldn't catch the credits that whisked by at the end). A nice visual pun near the end compared so many gangster movies where we see the neatly dressed Mafioso etc. in expensive suits putting on a pinkie ring, etc., and here the danger is clearly when the Yakuza-type takes off his clothes.(originally written 6/20/1997)