The Pillow Book / O Livro de Cabeceira

Em Kiotto, no Japão dos anos 70, a jovem Nagiko (Vivian Wu) comemora o seu aniversário com um estranho ritual. Seu pai escreve em seu rosto uma benção enquanto sua tia lê "um livro de cabeceira" escrito por Sei Shonagon, há quase mil anos. Nagiko cresce entre livros, papéis e escritas em corpos nus e essa sua odisséia sexual, se repete como um ritual a cada ano, mesmo com sua vida tomando rumos cada vez mais excitantes. Obrigada a aceitar um casamento arranjado, ela descobre segredos íntimos de seu pai enquanto o desejo pela escrita em seu corpo cresce a cada dia se transformando em uma verdadeira obsessão...até conhecer Jerome (Ewan McGregor), um tradutor inglês. Um homem bissexual que irá mudar seu destino e transformar seus desejos mais secretos em realidade!


Ewan McGregor stars in Peter Greenaway's torrid melodrama about the relationship between a young Japanese woman and a bisexual translator, both of whom make a fetish out of calligraphy. This is both esoteric, art house filmmaking and full of passion, jealousy and revenge. The Pillow Book is a seductive and elegant story that combines a millennium of Japanese art and fetishes with the story of a neurotic modern woman who tells a lover: "Treat me like the pages of a book." Early in Nagiko's life, she sees something she was not intended to see: Her father's publisher forcing her father to have sex as the price of getting a book published.

Nagiko flees an unhappy marriage to Hong Kong, where eventually she finds work as a fashion model and begins to seek lovers who will fulfill her dreams. For her the appearance of a person's handwriting is more important than the surfaces of his face; she wants to be used as a book, to be written on, to be read.

In Hong Kong, Nagiko takes a British lover, Jerome. He is a good lover and a bad calligrapher. Meanwhile, Nagiko's book has been rejected by the publisher (the very same publisher who has caused her so much unhappiness). Jerome hits on an inspiration: Why not use his body as her book, which he will then take to the publisher? She decorates his body; he goes to the publisher, and the publisher and Jerome end by making love.

Jerome's affair with the publisher inflames Nagiko and inspires her to create the monumental, subtly mischievous body-painting project that is the film's wicked piece de resistance. The pillow Book is a lavish, sensual and endlessly fascinating film that almost fetishes fetishism; this is provocative in every sense.


Ritual, eroticism, poetry and snobbery are the cornerstones of the 10th-century Japanese text that inspires Peter Greenaway's rapturously perverse new film. Since these are also essential aspects of Greenaway's own work, the match is phenomenally apt. The Pillow Book finds the filmmaker at his most atypically seductive, creating a spellbinding web of cruel elegance and intricate gamesmanship, exploring the exotic, haunting beauty of the bizarre. The film is best watched as a richly sensual stylistic exercise filled with audaciously beautiful imagery, captivating symmetries and brilliantly facile tricks. Traces of the filmmaker's supercilious misanthropy, as in his views of vulgar Americans and the Yiddish language, are also part of this mix. ~ Janet Maslin, New York Times



Ewan McGregor in the Pillow Book, top, and in an undated photo. McGregor played a gay character
in the 2006 British film Scenes of a Sexual Nature. He will co-star in I Love You Phillip Morris, in which
comedian Jim Carrey plays a married prisoner who falls in love with another inmate, played by McGregor


Trailer
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/z4I75Rvb0zo&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/z4I75Rvb0zo&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1</a>

Title: The Pillow Book / O Livro de Cabeceira
Director: Peter Greenaway
Genre: Drama / Romance
Running time: 126 minutes
Country: France. Great Britain
Cast: Vivian Wu (Nagiko), Ewan McGregor (Jerome). Yoshi Oida (The Publisher)
Language: English, Cantonese + Portuguese subtitles.
IMDB (6.5stars): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114134/

Links
http://rapidshare.com/files/149129984/The_Pillow_Book__1996_.avi.001
http://rapidshare.com/files/149142813/The_Pillow_Book__1996_.avi.002
http://rapidshare.com/files/149154660/The_Pillow_Book__1996_.avi.003
http://rapidshare.com/files/149167376/The_Pillow_Book__1996_.avi.004
http://rapidshare.com/files/149179033/The_Pillow_Book__1996_.avi.005
http://rapidshare.com/files/149193767/The_Pillow_Book__1996_.avi.006
http://rapidshare.com/files/149202857/The_Pillow_Book__1996_.avi.007
http://rapidshare.com/files/149205937/The_Pillow_Book__1996_.avi.008

Portuguese subtitles
http://rapidshare.com/files/149118732/The_Pillow_Book__1996_.srt