This movie is one of the great arts movies Ewan Mcgreggor ever made.The story starts slow and in the beginning you are going to wonder if your watching the rite movie.Its a very unique film by Peter Greenaway and its also filmed in a very strange way.Some of the scenes are in black and white but the rest is in colour.Ita also a multi lingual film including :English, Cantonese, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin, FrenchInbetween the most beautiful french love songs are sung which accompanies the "pillow book" scenes very wellAlthough this film contains a lot of nudity both male and female it should not be viewed for that reason but for the art of it.This is definitely a movie you must see if you love indie artsy movies.Like i said its filmed very strangely but once you get the drift is amazing8/10 deserved.

The thing about cinema in general, a Western invention and as such shaped by Western thinking, is that it is often too specific, about physical action revealing a moral understanding. The insight is shortsighted. To abstract as all the great filmmakers known to us have done, is to transplant that specific experience into the center from where all creative energy emanates. The Japanese (tracing it back to China) had mastered this centuries ago. It's a culture that revolves around form rather than narrative. Whereas our drama is often hysterical, theirs is subdued and sublimated into abstraction.Their abstraction is in the best possible way about a perfect centeredness. Flowing from and returning to a center. Flowing outwards into form and once replenished there, returning with wisdom about the emptiness of form (and joy that the form is only a mask). Their compositions (painted, written, or later filmed) are clean and sparse, signifying the vitally empty as a dynamic process. Thus every utterance in form, say by the calligrapher's brush, perfectly radiates with that transcendence of opposites - the vital and the empty are one. There is no confusion or agitation that comes from attachment, that's the idea at least.The thing about Greenaway is that he's aiming for a similar transcendence, but through an effort of loading forms until they break to reveal. When he fills his films with lists and lists about books, our constricted knowledge of the world and how it limits, it is always with the intent of transcending them. It is always about the creative process as a means of reaching beyond the list. Prospero's Books reaches there, arguably however the work was already laid out for him by Shakespeare.Here he tackles a subject that is completely alien to Greenaway logic. It is about a young Japanese woman doggedly looking to find a man who is both a lover and a calligrapher. Who can write beautifully on her naked body. The film specific idea chimes with the heart of the abstraction; inner expression expressed in visible form, with in our case the naked body as a perfect blank paper. And that expression in form brought by its author literally to life.There is not much to say on the subject outside the depiction. The very act communicates all. So that leaves the rest of the film a series of beautiful tableaux about bodies, naked or not, painted or not, and calligraphic backdrops of various kinds. Eventually it is again about books, human books each with its own message, where thought is exorcised so that it can be replenished again. Having emptied herself of all the accumulations of her past, by the end she is free to write her own 'pillow book'. She can sign her own name. As usually with Greenaway, everything is also about him creating his own film.Maybe because he's done this kind of thing for so long that it has lost its novelty, maybe because his style to overload is in stark contrast with the vital emptiness the subject demands, the film seems to be missing something. Prospero's Books was closer to his sensibility and as such a more rewarding film (if also more oblique and difficult).

I'm not even completely sure how I came across this film - it was either on the internet somewhere, or by sheer coincidence. But I definitely do not regret putting my two hours into it.I gave The Pillow Book a 9 out 10, simply because the director tried a little too hard with the picture-in-picture thing. Sometimes simultaneously watching two different, sometimes three different scenes at once, got a little chaotic and tiring. But more than that, it eventually just became annoying, and slightly irritated me a bit by the end. It definitely wasn't enough to take away from the film itself, though, it especially did not alter the plot in any way, shape, or form. A minor annoyance, that was meant to be artistic, but was eventually a little over-done in my own, personal opinion, while watching the film.I won't go into much detail of the plot, as countless other comments have already done so, but I will say this: I was a little lost at certain parts of this movie, and I'm not usually one to say that often. One of the parts was a very important scene in the film, that has a whole lot to do with everything, in the end. The scene I'm talking about is when the main character's father is being forced to have homosexual relations with his publisher in order to get his things published. When this was shown, it was just a little peek into the room, and I, for whatever reason, did not pick up on what was going on. Soon enough, the scene ended, another began, and I continued on my merry little way throughout the film, completely oblivious to the importance of that scene. There were a couple other, maybe 1 or 2, parts where I stopped and thought, "Wait, what?", but continued on, but they were so few, and much less important than that first one. So, do not be afraid of stopping the movie for a second, or rewinding it, if you are a little confused. At some points you're supposed to be confused, but others, you're not.I will admit that while my first run through this film, had I not finished it yet and was only a little bit before halfway through it, I would have probably given it a 6/10, maybe 7/10. It, at times, although I hate to admit it now, became a little boring to me. Some parts just did not make sense, and the little picture-in-picture was beginning to get to me some. But, I urge you all to stick with it, as it DOES get better! And it is completely worth your time in the end.There's no way I would regret spending two hours of my time for this film now, and I would love to see it again, though in a reasonable space of time. It's not exactly a movie you'd see once, and then go see again one or two days later since you loved it. It's more like you loved it still, but you should watch it with big time intervals inbetween. You'll forget the little details, and then, once immersed to it again, it will seem all the more pleasantly erotic and interesting. The tale even has a darker side to things towards the end, which was a bit of a surprise for me.Bottom line, I recommend this film to anyone who is open minded, mature, and has an interest in seeing and learning about new cultural experiences.

Inventive and most original, full of arresting images and unpredictable developments, this flick has one fatal flaw.The whole progression of the story is predicated on the character Nagiko's obsessive power over others. One would have to have the beauty and fascination of ten Mata Haris to carry off this woman's singular willfulness. But the actress who impersonates Nagiko has none of that. She is a reasonably pretty female with little or no personal magnetism that one can discern. Her high-pitched voice and peevish, juvenile enunciation of the English language are singularly irritating. At one point she is called by the script to scream out the name Jerome a dozen times (she pronounces it "J'roam"): she sounds like a hysterical high school student, or perhaps a dental assistant whose finger has been drilled through.As a result of this flaw, the spectator is bewildered by the sight of two dozen men running around feverishly trying to execute this woman's whims. It makes nonsense of the whole situation.Ewan McGregor is sweet and charismatic (and lovely to look at) as the much screamed about Jerome—one wonders what did he ever see in the aggravating Nagiko.