CINEMA: Derek Malcolm
Peter Greenaway has never made a less than accomplished film, but nor is he ever likely to make one that’s fully comprehensible at first sight, which is a bit of problem for your average film-goer. The Pillow Book, however, is a distinct advance on his last, The Baby Of Macon, since its subject matter chimes in so extraordinarily well with Greenaway’s concern for detail and the expressiveness of decoration.
Visually it is a constant treat. What’s there dovetails almost perfectly with the properly erotic concerns of the film, which are sex and power and the relevance of the past to the present and future.
It is hardly possible to synopsise the story. It concerns Nagito, daughter of a famous calligrapher, who is married off at 18 to a dull archery enthusiast and runs away to Hong Kong, where she leads a successful modelling career. Obsessed with the way her father wrote on her body, she seeks out lovers who will do the same. An Englishman she meets suggests she writes on her lovers’ bodies instead, and an obsessed photographer wants to take the results to a homosexual publisher, who once had sex with her father.
Greenaway traverses this weird story with a sensuous appreciation of the power of sex and a determination to display the narrative in novel forms. What he has achieved is an impressive look at how the past, present and future match as we stride towards the millennium with rather less certain footsteps than his own and a little less poetry in, or on, our bodies.
The original, uncut Pillow Book shows at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town until January 23