I found Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996) pretty difficult to get through. Although it’s just over two hours long, it actually took me a few weeks to finish it, and it felt longer and was less enjoyable than Shoah (1985), which as a nine-hour documentary about Nazi death camps, is saying something (by comparison I finished Shoah in under two days). Paradoxically, given the amount of nudity, sex, and violence in The Pillow Book, it’s one of the most boring films I’ve ever seen.

Its core conceit, which equates literature (especially the act of writing) with sexual pleasure, is one that I find very difficult to accept. While reading certainly has its pleasures, writing is neither erotic nor pleasurable…

I found Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996) pretty difficult to get through. Although it’s just over two hours long, it actually took me a few weeks to finish it, and it felt longer and was less enjoyable than Shoah (1985), which as a nine-hour documentary about Nazi death camps, is saying something (by comparison I finished Shoah in under two days). Paradoxically, given the amount of nudity, sex, and violence in The Pillow Book, it’s one of the most boring films I’ve ever seen.

Its core conceit, which equates literature (especially the act of writing) with sexual pleasure, is one that I find very difficult to accept. While reading certainly has its pleasures, writing is neither erotic nor pleasurable…

The Pillow Book is a film in which the visual style is foremost, and the story is secondary, which is the bad way to put together a film. Filmmaker Peter Greenaway provides a visual feast with scenes that are layered picture-in-picture shots over regular footage, mixed with traditional Japanese art and lettering to simulate an elaborate Japanese pillow book (a book of observations and musings). Often there is so much happening on screen that it is difficult to focus.

The story revolves around Nagiko (Vivian Wu), the daughter of a calligrapher. Nagiko is obsessed with seeking revenge for her father, a calligrapher who was forced to provide sexual favors to his gay publisher. To reach the elusive publisher, Nagiko becomes…

The multimedia visualization as artsy justification of a rather extreme fetish story (which works, mind you), seems a touch self-conscious for Peter Greenaway. After all, he used to just set up the camera a la Kubrick, fire off a master shot, tons of crap in the foreground, and go to town with perverse doings the likes of which we love to be both entertained and shocked by Here, Greenaway invites us into a more straightforward version of his taxonomy laden festivals of debauchery, mixing classic cultural tradition and literary double entendres graciously; while continually bombarding us with a visual adrenaline jolt: superbly framed visions of bodies covered in text, frames within frames of recollection and prediction and the crème de…