Now playing at the Caprice

Peter Greenaway's films are so original that even his miscalculations–one can't really call them mistakes–differ from the motion-picture norm. To begin with, his primary cultural influences are musical and painterly, not literary or cinematic. More unusual still, this thoroughgoing avant-gardist is less attracted to the anything-goes postmodern period than he is to the stately strains of the Baroque era. Most of the mind-blowing film scores he has commissioned sound like a happy marriage between Philip Glass and J.S. Bach.

Each Greenaway project is marked by a unique combination of historical and aesthetic elements. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, for instance, crossed the dark threads of Jacobean revenge tragedy with the golden tones of 19th-century French erotic tableaux to great and memorable effect. In the same vein, Prospero's Books owed less to Shakespeare's play than it did to Leonardo da Vinci's journals.

For the most part, The Pillow Book, Greenaway's latest effort, is as dramatically innovative and visually arresting as were its predecessors. In terms of narrative complexity, it is his most ambitious feature yet. Loosely based on a diary completed 1,001 years ago by Sei Shonagon, a lady-in-waiting in the imperial court of Heian Japan, The Pillow Book simultaneously unfolds in two countries and four time periods, making use of three film styles, three speeds, six languages, two schools of calligraphy, and a kaleidoscopic variety of artistic techniques. Virtually every frame of this motion picture is embellished with an inset picture–a technique borrowed from Japanese painting and manga–that tells some other part of the story. Most remarkably of all, despite its formal intricacy, The Pillow Book's plot is fairly easy to follow.

The film's central figure is Nagiko (Vivian Wu), a Japanese woman who becomes fixated on the relationship between calligraphy and sex after her writer father (Ken Ogata) celebrates her birthday by painting her face with legendary words and symbols. For the rest of her life, this highly suggestible young woman will seek out lovers whose sexual thrusts are equal to their brush strokes–and vice versa.

To honour her late father, Nagiko decides to become a writer herself. In place of offering up her own naked body as parchment, she now inscribes her words on willing male flesh. Opposing her in this endeavour is her father's former publisher (Yoshi Oida), a manipulative monster who inflicts gross indignities on the two men Nagiko most loves (including an ambisexual British translator, played by Trainspotting heartthrob Ewan McGregor). Before revenging herself on her archenemy, however, this modern-day Electra must first send him 13 books inked onto 13 masculine canvases. Everything in this film is translated into art–even getting even.

Throughout The Pillow Book, Greenaway makes psychological associations and visual equivalencies. In this film, the brush equals the penis and paper equals flesh. Japanese erotic painting shares the screen with European-style nudes. Sei Shonagon's elegantly languid lists are immaculately reproduced on-screen by Greenaway's usual cameraman, Sacha Vierny. Most important of all are the connections drawn between writing and sex and writing and painting.

To differentiate time and place, Greenaway shot The Pillow Book in three different speeds: slow for Japan in the 1970s and '80s, very slow for the same country a thousand years earlier, and frenetic for contemporary Hong Kong.

Somehow or other, the director manages to keep all these balls in the air for an astonishing 126 minutes.