THE PILLOW BOOK
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1997 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: THE PILLOW BOOK is a stylishly
presented but overly long and deliberate
modernization of the 10th Century Pillow Book of
Sei Shonagon. What could have been a good study of
clash of traditional and modern values never really
gets beyond being self-indulgent and even obscure.
Rating: -1 (-4 to +4), 2 (0 to 10)
New York Critics: 8 positive, 2 negative, 4 mixed
Peter Greenaway is a filmmaker who often expects a lot from his audience and takes chances. The downside of taking chances is that sometimes you lose. THE PILLOW BOOK is one of his losses. This is a film that is pretty to look at and one which does a lot of strange and unexpected things with the visual style. But the story is over-blown, over-long, overly-obscure, and overly melodramatic.
The basis and inspiration for Greenaway's latest film is the original Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, published in Heian period, the late 10th Century Japan. The original was a collection of poetry, reminiscences--some amorous, lists, and anecdotes all relevant to court life of the time. Greenaway's film inspired by that book is the story of Nagiko (played by Vivian Wu), a modern woman who one millennium later is collecting her own set of experiences, mostly erotic, inspired by Sei, bur also by her own fascination with body painting. Nagiko's fascination stems from her father's annual ritual of on her birthday painting text on her face and neck and retelling of how God made people out of clay. In his myth God painted each of them, naming them in the process. If He approved of his work he also signed it.
Nagiko grows with an erotic fascination with having text painted on her body. Her first requirement of a lover is that he be a good calligrapher, painting nearly anything on her body in any language. In flashbacks, often in only one small part of the screen, we see how her father was betrayed by his publisher who also forced her into marriage with his nephew. The husband proves to be a cruel and insensitive man who is also a lousy calligrapher in bed. The film has a problem in that most viewers from a European background are uneducated in the subtleties of Japanese calligraphy and will not know good work from work not so good. Nagiko eventually finds love in the arms of Scotsman Jerome (Ewan McGregor of EMMA and of course TRAINSPOTTING--any young Scottish actor you see these days is probably from TRAINSPOTTING). But when the publisher's hand reaches again into her life, she decides it is time for a particularly appropriate retribution.
In the tradition of his PROSPERO'S BOOKS Greenaway plays with his screen composition. He varies the size and shape of the screen. He will inlay as many as four smaller frames with action into a full-sized fifth frame, now reduced to a cross. Greenaway works to combine the texture of the original Pillow Book on paper with his own updated version of the story. The result is hypnotic but eventually the slow and deliberate pacing and the repetition begin to wear on the audience. Nagiko's attempts to recreate the painting experience of her early youth in erotic terms almost reminds one of Jack Nicholson's stylized erotic ritual toward the end of CARNAL KNOWLEDGE. The pretensions of Greenaway's style become a liability when there is too long for too little story. In the final analysis the story seems more an erotic dream than an intelligent narrative. Occasional pieces of wit do leaven the story, but they require careful observation and are of a very dry humor. One example: characters in the film are painted with texts meaningful to them, and apparently in the same vain a van is painted with road maps, the texts that it follows.
Greenaway's films are rich with style, but style without a good plot can be as bad as plot without style. I found his recent THE BABY OF MACON far more rewarding. Greenaway taking on Japanese culture should have been a good deal more insightful and less tedious. I rate it a -1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
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