THE PILLOW BOOK (59)

Directed by: Peter Greenaway

Starring: Vivian Wu, Ewan McGregor, Ken Ogata

The Pitch: A little girl's father writes her name on her body every year in a birthday ritual ; when she grows up, she seeks a lover who can give her the same grapho-sexual thrill.

Theo Sez: Hypnotic stuff - though the best way to watch it is probably to leave after the first hour or so, at which point you may feel you've seen one of the decade's most visionary works. The change of locale, from England to the Far East, seems somehow to have transformed Greenaway's over-decorated style - or at least our (i.e. my) perception of it. What seemed heartless and elitist becomes, amid the frenetic bustle of cosmopolitan Hong Kong (with its Wong Kar-Wei associations), full of buzzing energy - still heartless, but appropriately so ; and what seemed pedantically fogeyish - all the number-games and pseudo-Vermeer compositions - becomes new and stimulating when infused with Oriental exoticism. The gimmickry - the images-within-images and wealth of clever CGI effects - though imaginative, is actually the least of it ; it's also (for Greenaway) an incredibly sensual film : a slow pan down Wu's body is so delicately-lit she seems to glow from within, and even the soundtrack substitutes smoky, plangent songs for Michael Nyman's electronic dirges. It even tries for emotional weight, which is probably a step too far for this narratively-challenged director : just when the story seems about to take off - our heroine tearfully spurning her lover as he beats desperately at her door - it settles back into dry-intellectual mode, taking almost an hour to crawl through a list of the titular volume's thirteen "books" (and you just know it's thirteen because of some undivulged esoteric significance, the number of Shih Huang Ti's concubines or something). In the end, like his heroine, Greenaway claims to be interested in love but is only interested in calligraphy - albeit very beautiful calligraphy. Half-full or half-empty, according to taste.