"The Pillow Book" takes a Japanese female calligrapher Kazuko who writes on the human body as the main character, showing the oriental taste represented by the beauty of calligraphy, as well as the oppression and resistance of the Eastern style. The plot development in the film is almost all related to Oriental calligraphy and "Pillow Grass". Director Peter Greenaway borrowed various forms and sentimental sentiments from "Pillow Grass" to create a whole new story. The narration of the film’s story is as gorgeous, complicated and weird as the director’s previous films. In this film, the Baroque style of Western classical art, Japanese Ukiyo-e and modern multimedia art are cleverly combined to make the narrative and modeling better. Abnormally prominent. The film story has a fanatical awareness of idolatry, which is manifested in treating human skin as paper and writing text on it, and the entire human body becomes a book.
Compared with the director’s previous films, the theme of sex is very eye-catching in "The Pillow Grass". Most of the sex scenes are shrouded in words and pen and ink, which makes people feel that the beauty of the human body and the beauty of calligraphy complement each other. Not only the two male and female starring Ewan McGregor and Vivian Wu's elegant erotic calligraphy is suffocating, and Vivian Wu's body full of words is even more subtle and bewitching under the mobilization of the director's technical photography skills. The film production creatively uses the post-modern collage method of picture-in-picture. The images whose shapes, sizes, and positions are all changing form a variety of visual and structural relationships, most of which are small images that are in opposition to the larger ones. Explain that there are still many pictures that are memories, and they also have movie language functions similar to dissolving, and they have also made extensive use of computer technology to put the stories that occurred in different eras and time and space on the same film plane in the form of "picture-in-picture" Unfold, unearth unprecedented movie grammar. The nesting and juxtaposition of multi-functional and multi-level large and small screens forms a complex and changeable language style and screen expressiveness. This is the director's unique film language experiment.
The beauty of the human body in "The Pillow Book" goes another way, namely the mandatory combination with calligraphy. In this film, the director embodies his fetishism towards "Oriental characters" very blatantly. The huge Chinese characters that often appear are shining in the dark as the background of the picture, and the text has almost become his totem. Perhaps these calligraphy carriers are all male flesh. Therefore, when a body full of words appears in the picture, it is easy to feel a suffocating atmosphere of dominance over the world. Director Peter Greenaway discovered from the original work a form of imagining the past, present, and future on the screen at the same time, that is, through two protagonists from foreign countries, the East and the West are connected, and the language and image are combined through Japanese hieroglyphs. link together. At the same time, in the director's "violent" tone, the film also shows a stunning utopian color. The director’s films have always been obscure and full of artistic taste. In comparison, "Pillow Grass" pays more attention to details and decorations. The narrative is very successful and the expression is also very good. It shows the oriental culture in the eyes of Westerners.
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