'Pillow Book': Going Soft

Watching the films of Peter Greenaway, from "A Zed and Two Noughts" to "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover," you get the overall impression of a cold-steeled aesthete who’s incapable of sentimental feelings. As a filmmaker, Greenaway finds his passion in numbers, coincidence, stone-cold logic and a certain blindness to cruelty. He’s the grown-up version of a boy with a bee, a bottle and a razor blade. He can slice that insect into several sections -- which he will dutifully catalogue in a grimy notebook -- but it won’t occur to him that the bee is in agony.

So it’s strange to see him getting positively tender in "The Pillow Book." Although this movie, about a woman’s obsession with body painting, has most of his cold, intellectual hallmarks, its central story is a relatively syrupy romance. Has Greenaway gone soft and fuzzy on us?

The movie is constructed as a mystical, somewhat sadistic fairy-tale. In contemporary Japan, Nagiko Kiohara (Vivian Wu) has been indelibly affected by an annual ritual she has undergone throughout childhood. On every birthday, her writer/calligrapher father (Ken Ogata) has painted a greeting on her face with brush and ink, while her aunt (Hideko Yoshida) reads to her from Sei Shonagon’s 10th-century diary, "The Pillow Book."

The young girl becomes fixated on the classic book, a compilation of Shonagon’s observations about court life, literature and natural history. She’s also affected by a sexual transaction which she witnessed on her fifth birthday. It seems her financially dependent father is forced to satisfy his homosexual publisher (Yoshi Oida) in return for getting published.

When the father-daughter ritual ends upon her 18th birthday, Nagiko seeks a similar birthday relationship with her new husband, who happens to be the publisher’s nephew. Unhappy in this loveless, arranged marriage, and frustrated at her husband’s unwillingness to paint her body, Nagiko begins a wanton, spiritual search. She seduces dozens of calligraphers, who cover her body in symbols.

Many wham-bam, pen-and-sex encounters later, Nagiko (who has become successful as a model and has moved to Hong Kong) meets Jerome (Ewan McGregor), who happens to be the publisher’s lover. Nagiko works on a double plan: to exact revenge on the exploitative publisher and to find someone who will solemnly write birthday greetings on her in the manner of her beloved days with her father. In the meantime, she falls in love with Jerome.

The images, filmed as always by cinematographer Sacha Vierny, are painterly and supple. Befitting the theme (something between "You are what you write" and "I can read you like a book"), there are shots layered within shots; and elegantly inscribed words are superimposed on the screen, so that text and image become one.

But the story, which includes a prolonged display of McGregor’s no-longer private parts, is simplistic and banal rather than exacting and mannered. And when Greenaway attempts to express the love between Nagiko and Jerome in an extended, visually multilayered musical sequence, the effect is cloyingly empty. Greenaway, whose mind is one of the most impressive, complicated organs that ever sat on the shoulders of a filmmaker, seems to be playing connect the dots to himself, almost dumbing himself down to be commercial. "The Pillow Book" finds the British director both unlike himself and too much like himself. It’s the kind of bizarre conundrum Greenaway would have delighted in, if it weren’t at his expense.

THE PILLOW BOOK (Unrated) — Contains graphic nudity, sex scenes and violence.