Word: greenaway
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...Pillow Book For a film about sexual, romantic and literary obsessions, in which a Japanese woman literally inscribes the book of love across the bodies of men, director Peter Greenaway and his production designers, Wilbert van Dorp and Andree Putman, provide the ultimate in layered looks. Japanese calligraphy cascades down split screens; inserts open within larger images like windows on a computer screen. The visual stringencies of old Japan meet the clutter of the global village. In a word: fascinating...
...last millennium, the Japanese courtesan Sei Shonagon wrote The Pillow Book, which survives as a masterpiece of erotic and political intrigue. A thousand years later, the English filmmaker Peter Greenaway (Drowning by Numbers, The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover) has created a severe, rhapsodic fable about body painting--about a woman's desire to make of herself a living work of erotic...
...Greenaway film is a complex word-and-picture game--of stories within stories, images within images, like a Chinese puzzle box. The director also insists that his actors throw themselves, soul and especially body, into his complex revenge scenarios. Wu is a fine, supple tabula rasa; McGregor (Trainspotting) shows again that he is one of the boldest, most charming young actors...
...lovely that, in an age when pop culture dances with the dunces, someone has the mandarin urge to arouse and test his audience. Lovelier still when, as in The Pillow Book, text and texture meet so exquisitely. Sex is a visual art, Greenaway says, and writing is a matter of life and death...
...later, Nagiko (Vivian Wu) tries to duplicate, erotically, the touch of her father's brush. She challenges her lovers to write their lust all over her body. Then she finds a handsome Englishman (Ewan McGregor) who convinces her that she should do the writing, on his body. "Any Peter Greenaway (Drowning by Numbers, The Cook The Thief His Wife & Her Lover) film is a complex word-and-picture game -- of stories within stories, images within images, like a Chinese puzzle box," says TIME's Richard Corliss. "The director also insists that his actors throw themselves, soul and especially body, into...