THE PILLOW BOOK Movie Review

A young Japanese girl, whose calligrapher father celebrates her birthdays by lovingly painting a ritualized message on her face grows into a woman (Vivian Wu) who's driven inexorably into an obsessive, all-encompassing quest for erotic perfection. The Pillow Book is one of director Peter Greenaway's most accessible and visually intoxicating works, exploring themes of the parent-child bond, eroticism, fetishism, feminism, and intellectual freedom, all within the context of one woman's search for the perfect male body on which to practice her family's treasured art of calligraphy. (And therein lies The Pillow Book's first major power shift—she began her quest for erotic enlightenment by looking for a man to write on her.) Green-away seems to have found a near-perfect subject with which to exercise his visual technique. The electronic, computer-enhanced, video/film fusions that he's been experimenting with since his 1991 Prospero's Books seemed like a style in search of some substance, but now, happily, that particular yin and yang have settled cozily into Greenaway's unique and delicately satisfying The Pillow Book. (Cinematographer Sacha Vierny's images are dense, busy, and complex. To make sense of them on video try to use the largest, highest-definition TV or monitor you can find, and look at a laserdisc version of the film if at all possible.)

NEXT STOP … Drowning by Numbers, The Draughtsman's Contract, In the Realm of the Senses

1995 (NC-17) 126m/C NL FR GB Vivian Wu, Ewan McGregor, Yoshi Oida, Ken Ogata, Hideko Yoshida, Judy Ongg, Ken Mitsuishi, Yutaka Honda, Ronald Guttman; D: Peter Greenaway; W: Peter Greenaway; C: Sacha Vierny. VHS COL