The Pillow Book

Director Peter Greenaway once said that if you want to tell a story, write a book. In other words, film is not a storytelling medium. To a large extent, I agree with him. However, in my opinion Mr. Greenaway has never been a truly good enough director to fully realize his non-narrative dogma as other directors as diverse as Godard, Altman, and Lynch have with greater success. He comes closest in the thoroughly disturbing The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. This film is probably his least disturbing and most erotic, though I wish it amounted to more than it does. Vivian Wu plays a young Japanese woman with an almost Cronenbergian fetish for have calligraphy painted on her naked body (there are a lot of naked bodies of all genders in this film). She judges her lovers by the quality of their calligraphy. But soon she falls in love with an English translator played by Ewan McGregor who once again proves that he is a much bolder actor than most people realize. His writing is poor, but soon she is writing on him and creates a new art that she wants published by a publisher with a shadey past -- she writes books on different men and then sends them to the publisher to be seen (or something). It's all kind of interesting in a Peter Greenaway sort of way.