The Pillow Book

All the feature films I review are usually narrative in their structure. They may have other qualities too, but it is first and foremost as stories, and by the way they are told, that they are judged. It is not quite so easy with Peter Greenaway, who after all began his career in a non-narrative art form, painting. That film is a great deal more than storytelling is reflected in all his films, not least the latest addition, The Pillow Book.

The Pillow Book does, however, contain the slender story of the little girl Nagiko, who as a child has blessings written on her face in the most beautiful calligraphy on her birthday. As an adult, sex and calligraphy are strongly linked for her because of an experience on her 4th birthday, when she sees her father being sexually exploited by his publisher.

After a failed arranged marriage, Nagiko flees to Hong Kong, where she makes a career in the city's art and fashion world. When Nagiko tries to seduce the publisher who will not print her first collection of poems, she discovers that he is the publisher who exploited her father. She takes his young lover, the translator Jerome, as her lover and paints her first book on him, which she sends to the publisher. It develops into a bizarre power struggle which Nagiko, with her motive of revenge, is bound to win.

The pillow book is a diary which Nagiko writes in, and which one of her ancestors, the lady-in-waiting Sei Shonagon, developed into an art form.

So there is a plot in The Pillow Book, but it is a peculiar plot that probably only works in Greenaway's strange universe. Little as there is of it, though, the plot is necessary for the film's momentum. The film is, however, first and foremost a visual poem, which is visually innovative and in which several of Greenaway's usual themes recur, e.g. numerology, human bodies, writing and signs. As a visual and symbolic experience about love and art, the film cannot expect to keep the viewer in uninterrupted illusion for a full two hours. It certainly did not succeed with me, perhaps also because the characters never really become people of flesh and blood. Greenaway's universe is always exciting to explore, but tiring in the long run.

The film's experimental idiom also results in a mixture of colour and b/w images.