Pillow Book scraps entertainment for artistry

If you're looking to determine just how Oberlinized your film tastes have become, then Peter Greenaway's The Pillow Book should be right up your post-modern alley. This film is sure to be well-received by viewers seeking to impress fellow intellectuals by appreciating a marginal director's attacks on classic Hollywood style, no matter how failed that attack may be.

Story line, characterization, and traditional narrative conventions are cast away in favor of a disconcerting and distancing style. Greenaway departs from the typical Hollywood tactic of providing film viewers with easy to swallow stories, relying on artistic, challenging and intellectually stimulating visual effects to create entertainment. The problem with Greenaway's decision is that he fails to provide viewers with enough simple enjoyment to keep them interested in watching his film.

The Pillow Book's story unfolds using a mixture of rapidly edited images overlapped simultaneously on the same screen. Somewhat like a radical use of a split screen effect, the rectangular screen space fragments into small boxes of action layered over larger images of action.

At times, the screen divides into four large sections, each quarter containing their own film images. Images of multi-lingual text are often superimposed on top of the layered boxes of action, further breaking up screen space and complicating story meaning. Sound confusing? Though smartly put together with moments of visual beauty, the incessant use of this narrational style becomes at least annoying, if not completely alienating viewers from the story.

The problem with The Pillow Book is that it tries to be smart, experimental, and entertaining all at once, with far too much emphasis placed on the first two qualities. Like Greenaway's previous effort, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, The Pillow Book drags endlessly onward in a length unjustified by its visual aesthetics and intricately conceived ideas. Where is the story in all of this? Buried underneath levels of images manipulated past the point necessary to generate a strong narrative.

Greenaway strives to come down in between the radical art film and the interesting narrative film, and his high-pop-art results leave a viewer unsatisfied. The Pillow Book raises thoughtful issues over theories of text, authorship, and the body as artistic media, but Greenaway communicates these ideas through visual form rather than narrative structure.

Greenaway wants to entertain viewers not through story, but by giving them a jigsaw puzzle, and I wish any movie goer interested in sitting through all three showings of The Pillow Book good luck in making sense out of his ideas. The lack of characterization, plot motivation, and dramatic interest, not to mention the hurried and false sense of closure the ending provides, are all symptoms of The Pillow Book's weak narrative. With neither story nor film style to convey its intelligent theme in an interesting way, The Pillow Book lies rather uncomfortably as a viewing experience.

As for those of you who may think that a glimpse of Ewan McGreggor fully nude makes up for any short comings the film has, you probably saw better sights at Drag Ball. His most private parts make only the briefest of appearances, and are surprisingly inarticulate.

The Pillow Book shows Saturday at Kettering 11 at 7, 9:15 and 11:30 p.m. for $1.