![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Pillow Book (1996)
Oct. 17th, 2011 10:56The 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.
( Written on the body )
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.
( Written on the body )