Peter Greenaway

 Greenaway trained as a painter, and his films are often as much recordings of elaborate set pieces as traditional narratives. Quite a mix of exquisite sophistication, pretension and excruciating fixation with the disgusting.

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Pillow Book (DVD)    1996
DVD / Region 1 (USA)
$28.39  Sale: $23.28 Add to Cart
 
There are so few NC-17 movies. (Once it became clear that suburban theatres wouldn't screen them, studios stopped bothering to apply for a rating at all, so most highly erotic art-house movies are unrated.)

The Pillow Book is divided into 10 chapters (consistent with Greenaway's love of numbers and lists) and is shot to be viewed like a book, complete with tantalizing illustrations and footnotes (subtitles) and using television's "screen-in-screen" technology. An arresting Japanese model seeks to indulge her fantasy of having calligraphy inked on her body, a whim based partly on her father's habit of painting poetry on her face when she was a girl and partly on readings from the 10th-century erotica tome "The Pillow Book." But the tables are turned when she meets a bisexual English translator who wants to be her canvas instead. An assault on the senses in the best Greenaway tradition, featuring frames-within-frames, elaborate costuming and production design, painterly shot composition, and utterly frank scenes of nudity and violence.

Runtime: 126
Rating: NC-17 (MPAA)
Language: Original: Japanese, Chinese; Subtitled: English; Closed Captioned: English
Actors: Vivian Wu, Yoshi Oida, Ken Ogata, Hideko Yoshida, Ewan McGregor
Directors: Peter Greenaway

 
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