The Pillow Book (1996)

Director: Peter Greenaway

Screenplay: Peter Greenaway

Cast: Vivian Wu as Nagiko; Yoshi Oida as The Publisher; Ken Ogata as The Father; Hideko Yoshida as The Aunt / The Maid; Ewan McGregor as Jerome; Judy Ongg as The Mother; Ken Mitsuishi as The Husband; Yutaka Honda as Hoki

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Treat me like the pages of a book.

Prospero's Book (1991) can be seen as a turning point for the Welsh filmmaker Peter Greenaway. During the nineteen eighties, the former ephemeral and documentary filmmaker developed a reputation of very idiosyncratic films which got him attention and culminated in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), his most well known film and a success. Prospero's Book, his very experimental take on William Shakespeare's The Tempest, was a push in the limits of the cinematic form - his last film with composer Michael Nyman, who would add to Greenaway's  trademarks, and arguably into the nineties when his films would eventually become more obscurer again, especially as they could be difficult.

Interestingly The Pillow Book was a Film4 production, which helps in terms of visibility; what was also common however by now was Greenaway was acquiring Dutch financing for his films, into the Millennium the country of Netherlands being a huge supporter of him both in being able to still make films but also inspiration for his stories. To those who do not know him, it is befitting to know he was once working for the Central Office of Information (COI) on public information films, only to move onto his own film making, even with fictional tales. Obsessed with combining his admiration with high art (a filmmaker who looks to painting and literature constantly with great knowledge) against the crudeness corporal nature of human life and the body, he was an equal opportunity person for showing male and female nudity in-between his fixed obsessions with sex and death, alongside showing a take on lists and order which even an autistic viewer like myself has not leaned into as he has. Prospero's Book for example is structured, retelling The Tempest, around the exiled wizard's library of books and Greenaway letting his imagination run wild.

The Pillow Book, based on the ancient Japanese text by author and court lady Sei Shōnagon, is like many films of his structured on a story but obsessing over these interests of his. Nagiko (Vivian Wu) is a daughter of an author who, frankly, has developed an eroticised obsession with having calligraphy written on her own body due to her father, each of her birthdays, having a ritual recreating how a God created humankind from clay by writing their facial features and gender on his daughter's face. Her travels lead to a chance encounter with a publisher (Yoshi Oida) who forced her father into sexual favours, encountering his lover Jerome (Ewan McGregor) as she, pushed to now writing onto men's bodies as an authoress, is encouraged to publish her own work only to be angered when the publisher rejects her first attempt.

This plot gets more ghoulish, as this eventually leads to a pillow book being made of human flesh, but the most prominent aspect about production is its technical craft and form. Experimenting with the visual frame, Greenaway was a huge critic of the narrative form of cinema ushered in by the likes of D.W. Griffith, considering that it had not evolved. Greenaway became an early adopter of digital editing even when still using celluloid; here in The Pillow Book, whilst not as extreme as Prospero's Book, he takes advantage of it, having multiple screens at points in the images.

Contrasting monochrome flashbacks with current day coloured ones, including the original version of the film using calligraphy for subtitles¹, there can be multiples sequences playing at one, a scene likely to have the events for that character layered for each other as much as different events in different time zones transpiring together. One such example is the frantic love sick suicide of a character being layered together as a collage of screens. It is, still to this day, incredibly innovative especially as experiments like this would lead to Greenaway's cinema managing to evolve further by the time he started using more built, artificial sets into the late 2000s and 2010s for the Dutch co-productions. Before then as well, this would be the second-to-last film with cinematographer Sacha Vierny; Greenaway for all his issues with cinema, is a huge fan of films he admires, such as Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad (1961), rightly proclaimed by him as unique and managing to hire his hero, its cinematographer Vierny, to work with him decades after in the eighties to the end of the nineties, Vierny suited his striking visual look alongside always hiring great production designers, and clearly thinking in composition to match his interest in painting and illustration.

He also here also rode a bit of mainstream culture for once, just from the music choices which can vary between U2 to French pop, the later played with onscreen French subtitles like a karaoke bar video. Brian Eno as the composer does not hurt either, nor casting Ewan McGregor, just around the time of Danny Boyle's Trainspotting (1996), Greenaway even into his later obscurer years hiring some unlikely big names who clearly wanted to work with him. The one detail, the one that I do question, is that for a Japanese protagonist The Pillow Book does cast Chinese actress Vivian Wu, a choice which would be much more difficult to defend into the ongoing decades. I do wonder personally, even though there are actresses he could cast from Japanese cult cinema, even hiring Kirina Mano from Shinja Tsukamoto's Bullet Ballet (1998) for his follow up 8 ½ Women (1999), that there were a lot of issues which lead to this central lead choice. The character does speak fluent Mandarin from childhood, and Cantonese is spoken too as this is set partially in Hong Kong, but there is a sense of someone wanting to hire a higher profile lead willing to do full frontal nudity and that is why Wu was chosen. It is an odd casting choice, like when infamously Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), an American adaptation of a film about geisha culture, hired Chinese actresses to play Japanese women even if a Japanese-owned company produced it. It is the one thing which, over time, does cause one to scratch your head, and I say this knowing Vivian Wu does commit to the role brilliantly. Hers is one of those careers, eventually staying mostly within the Chinese film industry from the 2010s onwards, which is a head scratcher of pop culture just around one person. Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987) is one of her first prominent films, but it leads to one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle live action films; The Guyver (1991), a Japanese manga adaptation where she is cast as Japanese as well; the Tales from the Crypt TV series; an full motion video game oddity Supreme Warrior (1994), a first person fighting game from Digital Pictures, a company who tried and burnt themselves out (just in cash) by suggesting video games of the future had real actors and real interactive footage; the Highlander TV spin-off series, and various television show appearances from Murder, She Wrote, Millennium and ER, let alone a Peter Greenaway film where she takes admirable risk here in a sexually explicit and incredibly idiosyncratic narrative. She deserves a nod of respect for how idiosyncratic this CV I have barely covered is.

Beyond this, The Pillow Book is a thing of beauty nonetheless. Greenaway's career is full of films I could unpick a lot of detail from, enough in themselves to be big (or at least idiosyncratic) productions if someone else suddenly made them, and I have not even gotten to how distinct his voice is entirely, as Peter Greenaway is a director-writer and stamps his ideas into the material. Eventually his obsession with lists comes into play when, to torment the publisher, Nagiko starts creating books to send to him written on male bodies. That in itself is strange, as eventually you can have men with the calligraphy even hidden on their bodies or an existential text on another wondering if books have parents. The film is a grower. Once you adapt to its style, Greenaway becomes rewarding for a man who pushes the medium but, for all his criticisms of narrative cinema, always has very ornate plots with a lot of black humour and even emotion to them. Here, with one of the only ones with a female lead, it can be seen as a cliché her story is that of love, but even then this is an erotic drama about a strongly independent figure who, by the end, is proudly her own figure still, a peculiar tale to lead to this conclusion that is fascinating to watch.

Abstract Spectrum: Ghoulish/Meticulous/Playful

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

 

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1) Restored, prominently for a 2020 Indicator Blu Ray release in Britain, this subtitling whilst it does not translate everything has a distinct tone that adds to the aesthetic.