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The Pillow Book

6.8

2,108

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Original title

The Pillow Book

Year

1996

Running time

126 min.

Country

United Kingdom

Director

Peter Greenaway

Screenwriter

Peter Greenaway

Cast

Music

Brian Eno

Cinematography

Sacha Vierny

Producer

Co-production United Kingdom-Netherlands-France;

Woodline Films, Kasander & Wigman Productions, Alpha Film Corporation

Genre

Drama | Painting. 1970s

Synopsis

As a young girl in Japan, Nagiko's father paints characters on her face, and her aunt reads to her from "The Pillow Book", the diary of a 10th-century lady-in-waiting. Nagiko grows up, obsessed with books, papers, and writing on bodies, and her sexual odyssey (and the creation of her own Pillow Book) is a "parfait mélange" of classical Japanese, modern Chinese, and Western film images.

Awards: 1996: Sitges Film Festival: Best Movie, Best Cinematography

1997: Chicago Film Critics Awards: Nominated for Best Cinematography

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Critics' reviews

"Rapturously perverse (...) 'The Pillow Book' finds the filmmaker at his most atypically seductive, creating a spellbinding web of cruel elegance and intricate gamesmanship, exploring the exotic, haunting beauty of the bizarre. (...) a richly sensual stylistic exercise."

Janet Maslin: The New York Times
"I can't say that I've ever entertained fantasies of writing on someone's body. But Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book (Cinepix) does, at least, succeed in making it look like an erotic activity"

Owen Gleiberman: Entertainment Weekly
"Despite its arresting visual style, its wave after wave of creative and hypnotic images, The Pillow Book, as its name hints, slowly but inexorably leads to sleep."

Kenneth Turan: Los Angeles Times
"Greenaway and his picture-perfect cast weave so many interlacing threads into the story, and so many curious subtexts that it sometimes leaves us scratching our heads in wonderment."

Marc Savlov: Austin Chronicle
"It is at first daunting but ultimately awesomely impressive and beautiful."

David Stratton: Variety
"Dense, gorgeous and inexorable - once you give yourself over to its logic - it's a boldly erotic explosion of Asian chic, taken to places no film has gone before"

Jay Carr: Boston Globe
"Here both Greenaway's strengths and weaknesses are on show as he toys with the viewers' capacity to ingest blurring metaphors and convoluted content."

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User history

The Pillow Book

1996

Peter Greenaway

6.8

(2,108)