Review

Seemingly intent on outdoing even himself, director Greenaway achieves new levels of cinematic outlandishness with this visually sumptuous, kaleidoscopic panoply of fetishism, sexual degradation and desecrated corpses as set against the world of literature and poetry. Wu stars as Nagiko, a young Japanese woman who is obsessed with re-creating two childhood rituals: one in which her father (Ogata) wrote on her neck and forehead, the other being read to from the 1000-year-old "Pillow Book" of an imperial courtesan. This manifests in her adult life as a fixation for having her lovers write all over her body. She's living in Hong Kong when she meets McGregor, a translator who immediately takes to her lust for erotic penmanship and encourages her to publish her own "Pillow Book." Greenaway, never one to shy away from on-screen flesh, provides plenty of it here including full frontals of both McGregor and Wu (neither of whom is hard to look at). Some viewers might be little more than bewildered by Greenaway's overarching intellectualism (his references are obscure) and his opulent visual sense, but this is nothing less than a masterful addition to his opus. (In English and Japanese, Mandarin and Cantonese with English subtitles)