The Pillow Book

A Japanese calligrapher marks his daughter Nagiko's every birthday with two rituals: he paints a greeting on her face, and then his sister reads from Sei Shonagon's 'Pillow Book', a 10th century diary of reminiscences, observations, and list upon list of exquisite, precious and graceful things. Nagiko (Wu) grows up with a fetish for calligraphy - demanding that her lovers paint hieroglyphics on her flesh. She keeps a pillow book, too, but her lists reflect a growing frustration. Then an affair with a bisexual British translator, Jerome (McGregor), opens up possibilites. Jerome's scribbling cannot satisfy her, but he offers his own body as her canvas. They fall in love, and he strips to present her texts to his gay lover, a publisher. This is as defiantly esoteric as any of Greenaway's films, and as visually dense as Prospero's Books, with frames within frames, computer graphics, subtitles, projections and superimpositions all vying for the eye in a sumptuous, seamless collage of gold, red and black. The result is ravishingly gorgeous, but such aestheticism is itself a kind of perversion, an idea embodied in Nagiko. The actors are models, fetishised objects, and sometimes they seem utterly at a loss, but, by way of counterpoint, this is also both a very intimate, sensual film, and a torrid, lurid melodrama, full of passion, jealousy, hatred and revenge.