starlady: A typewriter.  (tool of the trade)
[personal profile] starlady
The Pillow Book. Dir. Peter Greenaway, 1996.

This is a strange, intense, fascinating movie.

As an adaptation of Sei Shônagon's Makura no soshi, the movie is brilliant when it bothers to actually focus on Sei's text, but that's only about a quarter of the film. The rest is taken up with the story of Nagiko Kiyohara, a half-Japanese half-Chinese native of Kyoto who is driven over the course of her restless first twenty-eight years from Japan to Hong Kong and back again, attempting to write--and succeeding in writing--her own Pillow Book, calligraphed on the bodies of her lovers. The most consequential of these is Jerome, a British translator whom she meets in Hong Kong and with whom she falls in love--and whose skin's particular suitability for writing material becomes crucial to Nagiko's story, and to the story of her attempt to honor her writer father, who inculcated in her the custom of writing on the body.

Unlike most people, I didn't find this movie disturbing. There is a portion of the movie that deals with flaying a human corpse, which I did find briefly gruesome (though I've been sensitized to human skinning by Murakami Haruki's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, still the only book to nearly make me vomit), but no, not disturbing. It's an intense, multilayered experience as cinema and as a story, dense and roiling, and that aspect was challenging; Greenaway's layering of multiple frames of simultaneously moving images into the cinematic frame, along with a very densely layered soundtrack, is anything but easy to grasp. The elements are heterogeneous, but they somehow manage to work together towards the same end; just Greenaway's usage of color versus black and white is brilliant.

And the end is undeniably potent, just as is all that came before--who else caught that the final confrontation with the publisher takes place on the night of 30 June/1 July 1997? In a movie that has a Chinese actress playing a half-Japanese woman, language and place and culture are undeniably important, and represented with subtle exactitude; I was impressed that Greenaway has Japanese actors playing Japanese roles and Chinese actors playing Chinese roles, unlike most of Hollywood, and at how much of both languages remained unsubtitled for an audience that doesn't know the languages. Ewan McGregor's Japanese sounds about like the Japanese of many British people with better command of the language than accent that I've met.

Indeed, my one major complaint is that the text of Makura no soshi that is read at various points in the film--not the text shown on screen, but the text read--is clearly some kind of modern translation. I was hugely disappointed, particularly because the movie starts by showing a section of the actual text in kuzushiji (handwritten) form, and the initial voiceover is in classical Japanese. But in the end this complaint doesn't detract from the power of Nagiko's story, as she moves from being the medium for writing to the writer herself.

If anyone gets the "writing on the body" square for [community profile] kink_bingo in the next round, you should totally do something with this movie, because writing on the body is seriously about half of it. And it is very sexy.

ETA: [personal profile] marina asked me whether I thought the movie was full of fail. I initially told her that I wasn't sure whether this was the kind of story that I would expect to see coming out of these cultures, but then I remembered people like Mishima Yukio and, hell, even Tezuka's MW, and I decided I couldn't, wouldn't, make that sort of judgment. I do think there's a really interesting postcolonial reading to be made of this film--the British white guy's skin becomes the central object of the film, is regained from a Japanese man by a half-Japanese half-Chinese woman on the night that Hong Kong is regained by China from Britain--and the film ends with the protagonist calligraphing characters onto her half-Sino-Japanese daughter by that British white man. I am not well-versed enough in postcolonial studies to attempt to string this all together, but it's clearly there, and I think someone could get at least two interpretations (fail and not fail) out of it.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-10-17 23:41 (UTC)
rachelmanija: (Staring at laptop)
From: [personal profile] rachelmanija
Someone other than me has seen this! I saw this years ago, in the initial release, and thought it was beautiful and dreamlike, more transporting than comprehensible. But in a good way.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-10-18 05:08 (UTC)
metaphortunate: (Default)
From: [personal profile] metaphortunate
I am not a Greenaway fan in general, but I love this movie!

(no subject)

Date: 2011-10-18 00:32 (UTC)
rushthatspeaks: (Default)
From: [personal profile] rushthatspeaks
One of my favorite movies ever. I have seen it so many times I've lost count-- and I don't get why it's generally described as disturbing.

But I hadn't gotten the date! Thank you, that is very useful.

It has a great soundtrack, too.

(no subject)

Date: 2011-10-18 01:00 (UTC)
lilacsigil: 12 Apostles rocks, text "Rock On" (12 Apostles)
From: [personal profile] lilacsigil
I also saw this on initial release, in Japan, and it was really fascinating. Like most of Greenaway's work, though, I think the symbolism tends to overwhelm everything else including the characters, but that's not necessarily a problem.

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