The Pillow Book (1996)

Director
Peter Greenaway

Main cast
Vivian Wu; Yoshi Oida; Ken Ogata; Hideko Yoshida; Ewan McGregor

Genres
Drama, Foreign, Romance

Description
Nagiko (Vivian Wu) is a Japanese model in search of pleasure and new cultural experience from various lovers. The film is a rich and artistic melding of dark modern drama with idealized Chinese and Japanese cultural themes and settings, and centers around body painting.


Similar movies

The trial, under The Obscene Publications Act, of the publishers of D.H. Lawrence's 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'in 1960 was a sensation that consumed the nation. The movie follows two fictional jurors, Helena and Keith, who become passionate lovers during the course of the trial and whose affair mirrors the themes of the novel.
Poongsan has the unenviable - and death-defying - job of delivering messages across the North and South Korean border to separated families. When South Korean government agents ask him to smuggle in In-ok, the lover of a high-ranking North Korean defector, into the South, the damsel and rescuer fall in love instead.
After being separated for years, former lovers Macy (Sandra Ng) and Anita (Vivian Chow) are reunited at a pregnancy seminar. After sharing the accidental circumstances that led to their respective pregnancies, the two fall back in love. However, to add to the trouble caused by the fathers of their babies (Eddie Cheung and William Chan), Anita also finds herself the victim of gender discrimination at work due to her pregnancy. Will Macy and Anita make it through the obstacles in the way of their reunion, and what roles will the two to-be-fathers end up playing in the women's lives?
A shallow, provincial wife finds her relationship with her preoccupied husband strained by romantic notions of love, leading her further towards Paris and the country wilderness.
Bertrand Beauvois, a well-known attorney, is in Monte Carlo to defend a businessman's mother who murdered a gigolo with ties to gangsters. The businessman provides a bodyguard, Christophe, who is thorough and unsmiling. The middle-aged Beauvois is drawn to Audrey, in her 20s, free spirited, a local TV weather girl who once dated Christophe. Although Christophe warns Beauvois to stay away from Audrey, he's hooked and spends every moment with her he's not in court. What's her angle: is she a plant who'll ruin the case; is Beauvois her toy; is she digging for gold; or, is she genuine? Beauvois loves the wild sex but not her promiscuity. Has Christophe failed to protect him?
'I hate luv storys' is the maxim Jay lives by. But as an assistant director to Veer, the most famous romantic filmmaker of Indian Film Industry, Jay has little option but to live with larger than life, glossy, cinematic love on an everyday basis. Things only get worse when he is made to work under the new production designer on the film… Simran, with whom he shares the strangest first encounter! Simran loves luv storys; So much so that even her life has begun to resemble one. With her ideal job and the perfect boyfriend, Raj, she lives a blissful, dreamy life; One that is rudely interrupted by Jay's cynicism. The turmoil's of Jay and Simran's life, is ironically interweaved with the Luv Story that they are working on…
Sidharth (Aamir Khan), is a Mumbai 'Tapori' and a boxing champion. His elder brother, Jai (Rajat Kapoor) works with Raunak Singh (Sharad Saxena), who now rules their "Basti" through terrorising its people and collecting 'Hafta' from local merchants. Sidharth idolized his father, a freedom fighter, whom he saw falling to his death as a child. This effects Sidharth through his adult life. Sidharth meets a young girl, Alisha (Ranee Mukherjee), who rides with a motorcycle gang and Charlie (Deepak Tijori), the gang leader. Sidharth also meets Hari, whose idealism reminds him of his father. Hari's social work in the community possess a threat to Raunak Singh's evil empire. What happens to Hari changes Sidharth's life forever. How Sidharth breaks Raunak Singh's chains of 'Ghulami' around the community forms the crux of the story. Featuring the superhit song "Aati Kya Khandala" sung by Aamir Khan.
A series of intertwining tales involve "pleasure seekers and pleasure providers" during the course of one night in Geylang, Singapore's red-light district. There are three distinct stories, united only by the presence of characters from all the stories in a streetside eatery:
Accomplished British screenwriter Christopher Hampton directs the political drama Imagining Argentina, based on the novel by Lawrence Thornton. Set during the unsettling disappearances in Buenos Aires during the dictatorship of the 1970s, the film involves theater director Carlos Rueda (Antonio Banderas) and his wife Cecilia (Emma Thompson). Shortly after Cecilia writes an editorial commentary questioning the mysterious abductions, she is herself abducted and taken into police custody. Soon Carlos develops the supernatural ability to see into the future and he imagines his wife meeting an awful fate during an escape attempt. To make matters worse, their teenage daughter Teresa (Leticia Dolera) is also kidnapped. Imagining Argentina was nominated for the Golden Lion at the 2003 Venice Film Festival. SCREENED/AWARDED AT: Venice Film Festival (ref. Amazon)
Emanuelle is sent to Bangkok on a journalism assignment. While there, she embarks on her own exploration of the secrets of sensual pleasure. While learning much, she also reveals several secrets of her own.
Set in a five star Tokyo hotel on New Year's Eve, the film follows the misadventures of various hotel staff and guests in the run-up to midnight. The plot involves numerous characters, the different problems or situations they face in the run-up to midnight, and the ways that these different storylines interact and are resolved. The film is reminiscent of the Hollywood screwball comedies of 1930s and 1940s, and explicitly references the 1932 film Grand Hotel, whose plot also followed the interlinked lives of various characters in a fictional hotel over a short period.
Three 40-something women in a small English town meet weekly for a ritual of gin, cigarettes, and sweets -- and swapped stories arguing which of them has the most pathetic love life. Kate is headmistress at the local school; her best friends are the town's police chief and a cynical, thrice-divorced doctor.
Ranjit Mehra and his wife Sonia live a middle-class life in rural India. Ranjit's passion is studying the heavenly bodies through various computers, telescopes, and communicators as he believes there is life beyond Earth. He continuously transmits the sound generated by the syllable "om" and hopes that someone somewhere will hear this and respond to it.
A famed artist fights his passion for a male model, until the young man falls for a woman.
Fashion begins in, where aspiring model Meghna Mathur (Priyanka Chopra) expresses her wish to go to Mumbai and pursue her dream of becoming a supermodel. Through her eyes we see that behind the glitz and glamour of the world of fashion not everything is as it seems.
Kambakkht Ishq is about a stuntman and a supermodel that don't believe in love but through a hilarious series of events they fall for each other.
Updated adaptation of Choderlos de Laclos' classic 18th Century tale of seduction, betrayal and revenge set in the modern 1960s world of Parisian high society. The beautiful Madame de Merteuil seeks vengeance against her ex-lover Gercourt when he becomes engaged to her young goddaughter, Cécile. Merteuil turns to her ex-lover/partner-in-crime, Valmont, famous for his reputation as a Don Juan, to seduce Cécile and emotionally destroy her. While on his mission, Valmont gets sidetracked when he goes to visit his aunt and falls for Madame Tourvel, a virtuous, married woman who knows of his womanizing ways, but that only makes the challenge more exciting to Valmont. Together, Madame de Merteuil and Valmont make a dangerous team and they will stop at nothing when it comes to matters of the heart.
Lovely Singh (Salman Khan) is the bodyguard of Sartaj Rana's (Raj Babbar) daughter Divya Rana (Kareena Kapoor). He is very devoted to his duties but irritates her all the time by following her everywhere. Consequently, Divya and her friend (Hazel Keech) call Lovely and start a prank love affair. Lovely starts loving the mystery person but doesn't realizes that it is Divya (who also falls in love with him) who was behind all of this. Sartaj Rana (Raj Babbar) suspects him and Divya to be in love and sends criminals to kill him in case his lover turns out to be Divya. Sensing this, Divya sends her friend to Lovely to tell him her true identity. In a twist, it is revealed that the friend is also in love with Lovely. She falsely accepts that she is her strange lover. They marry and have a child. She dies early and reveals to her son about her fraud and asks him to unite Lovely and Divya.
Follows the tale of a young woman’s sexual awakening and subsequent journey around the world in pursuit of her ideal lover. Encounters include an Arabian sheik and a Spanish bullfighter. Her friend and butler accompany her and help to arrange her couplings.
Never on Sunday is a 1960 Greek black-and-white film which tells the story of Ilya, a prostitute who lives in the port of Piraeus in Greece, and Homer, an American tourist from Middletown, Connecticut — a classical scholar enamored with all things Greek. Ilya is a character close to the "hooker with a heart of gold" cliché. Homer feels Ilya's life style typifies the degradation of Greek classical culture and attempts to steer her onto the path of morality. It constitutes a variation of the Pygmalion story. The film stars Melina Mercouri and Jules Dassin, and it gently submerges the viewer into Greek culture, including dance, music, and language (through the use of subtitles). The signature song and the bouzouki theme of the movie became hits of the 1960s and brought the composer, Manos Hadjidakis, an Academy Award.
Me and Orson Welles is a period-drama film directed by Richard Linklater and starring Zac Efron, Christian McKay and Claire Danes. Based on Robert Kaplow's novel of the same name, the story, set in 1937 New York, tells of a teenager hired to star in Orson Welles' production of Julius Caesar, where he becomes attracted to a career-driven production assistant.
Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda are all married now, but they're still up for a little fun in the sun. When Samantha gets the chance to visit one of the most extravagant vacation destinations on the planet and offers to bring them all along, they surmise that a women-only retreat may be the perfect excuse to eschew their responsibilities and remember what life was like before they decided to settle down.
George Clooney plays the dry cynical character of Ryan Bingham, an executive who specializes in "downsizing". Ryan lives out of his suitcase, traveling the country for the sole purpose terminating unwanted employees day after day. Just as Ryan is about to reach his life-long goal of the ten million mile frequent flyer mark some major changes come his way. Changes that threaten to crack the cold heartless exterior that is Ryan Bingham.
A small town in Australia, in the late 1950s: Brownie and Lola are deeply in love. But because they are under-age, their parents are against their relationship and try to separate them.
A modern love story in which a misanthropic, emotionally complex author of a hit children's book is forced to team with a beautiful illustrator after his best friend and collaborator passes away. As Henry struggles with letting go of the ghosts of love and life, he discovers that sometimes you have to take a gamble at life to find love.
Novalee Nation is a 15-year-old Tennessee transient who has to grow up in a hurry when she's left pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend on a roadside in Sequoyah, Okla., and takes refuge in the friendly aisles of Wal-Mart. In short order, some eccentric, kindly strangers "adopt" Novalee and her infant daughter, helping them buck the odds and build a new life.
The life of comedienne Fannie Brice, from her early days in the Jewish slums of the Lower East Side, to the height of her career with the Ziegfeld Follies, including her marriage to and eventual divorce from her first husband, Nick Arnstein.
The life of a divorced television writer dating a teenage girl is further complicated when he falls in love with his best friend's mistress.
A free-spirited artist (Elizabeth Taylor), who lives near California's Big Sur, meets the administrator (Richard Burton) of the parochial school that her young son attends and lures the cleric away from his wife (Eva Marie Saint).
Cultural critic David Kepesh finds his life -- which he indicates is a state of "emancipated manhood" -- thrown into tragic disarray by Consuela Castillo, a well-mannered student who awakens a sense of sexual possessiveness in her teacher.
Oscar-winner Colin Firth stars in this heart-warming cross-cultural romantic comedy set in the idyllic South of France. Nimi, a beautiful Nigerian single mother to son Sammy, is under pressure from her family to find a suitable husband and who better than the local Reverend? After making friends with Matthew, a British comic-book writer and one of his heros, Sammy has other ideas. He successfully plots to get them together but they've still a few obsticles to overcome. (from Amazon)
In director Baz Luhrmann's contemporary take on William Shakespeare's classic tragedy, the Montagues and Capulets have moved their ongoing feud to the sweltering suburb of Verona Beach, where Romeo and Juliet fall in love and secretly wed. Though the film is visually modern, the bard's dialogue remains.
A Himalayan legend of a love struggling against the inevitability of death, an astonishing tale spanning from the early 19th century mountain existence, to hectic, bustling modern day Tokyo.
Languid look at the Gullah culture of the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia where African folk-ways were maintained well into the 20th Century and was one of the last bastion of these mores in America.
Modern finnish movie about two very different young adults that after a chance meeting end up making music together and fall in love. While Nellis parents have the perfect career and man planned, she dreams of becoming a singer. Through a chance meeting at the studio, she meets the young and grungy Hip Hop music artist Sunen and asks him to help her make a demo tape. Not only is the ensuing story about differences growing closer and the difficulties that have to be overcome, well told. Also the music is exceptionally well made. It is quite unbelievable that this is the first feature of the director.
Shakespeare's comedy about two couples in love with the wrong partners, and how they are finally brought together rightly, thanks in part to the bungling work of Puck. It is completely in the language of the Bard, with Pfeiffer as the Fairy Queen and Kline as the one turned into her evening's lover with donkey ears.
A modern, punk adaptation of Shakespeare's classic. Told irreverently, this film attempts to impact the viewer in the same way theatre-goers were effected in Shakespeare's time. Bawdy, Violent, Humorous, and Romantic.
High Heels is a murder mystery comedy centering on flamboyant actress Becky del Paramo and her daughter Rebecca, a television anchorwoman. After being estranged for 15 years, Becky re-enters Rebecca's life when she comes to perform a concert. Rebecca, she finds, is now married to one of Becky's ex-lovers, Manuel. The mother and daughter begin making up for lost time, when suddenly, a murder occurs...
A university professor gradually succumbing to blindness is entranced by an obsessive love, in this modern-day adaptation of a classic Korean fairy tale.
To save his career, an ad man wants a sex symbol to endorse a lipstick. But she wants something too: he has to pretend to be her new lover.
Three penniless artists become friends in modern-day Paris: Rodolfo, an Albanian painter with no visa, Marcel, a playwright and magazine editor with no publisher, and Schaunard, a post-modernist composer of execrable noise.
When porn director Pablo reluctantly breaks up with his boyfriend, Juan, he encourages him to stay in touch. Juan moves away to live in a lighthouse and eventually writes his ex, but in the interim Pablo has taken up a psychotic new lover, Antonio (Antonio Banderas). Antonio intercepts their correspondence and flies into a towering rage, terrifying Pablo but inspiring him creatively as he works on a play about his transsexual sister.
Director Franco Zeffirelli's beloved version of one of the most well-known love stories in the English language. Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet fall in love against the wishes of their feuding families. Driven by their passion, the young lovers defy their destiny and elope, only to suffer the ultimate tragedy.
A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.
A former Secret Service agent grudgingly takes an assignment to protect a pop idol who's threatened by a crazed fan. At first, the safety-obsessed bodyguard and the self-indulgent diva totally clash. But before long, all that tension sparks fireworks of another sort, and the love-averse tough guy is torn between duty and romance.
Nemo Nobody leads an ordinary existence with his wife and 3 children; one day, he wakes up as a mortal centenarian in the year 2092.
Bhoominathan aka Bhoomi is introduced to us as a person who gets into many local fights. Worried about his future, his family sends him to Muthuramalingam (Raj Kiran), a much respected personality in his place Semmanur, to put Bhoomi's life on the right track. But things don't go as planned. Muthuramalingam's adversary threatens to kill his daughter Meera (Asin) as a revenge against his own daughter's fate. So Bhoomi is given the job of Meera's bodyguard at college. Meera goes to college with her friend Madhu but is irritated by Bhoomi's presence everywhere. So she devises a plan.
While attending a retrospect of his work, a filmmaker recalls his life and his loves: the inspirations for his films.
An emotionally and sexually charged journey through the love, addiction, and friendship of two men. Documentary filmmaker Erik and closeted lawyer Paul meet through a casual encounter, but they find a deeper connection and become a couple. Individually and together, they are risk takers—compulsive, and fueled by drugs and sex. In an almost decade-long relationship defined by highs, lows, and dysfunctional patterns, Erik struggles to negotiate his own boundaries and dignity and to be true to himself.
An overweight cook is given the opportunity to woo the girl of his dreams when he is given a "handsome suit" that transforms him into an idealized human being in this absurd Japanese comedy.
Sir Robert Chiltern is a successful Government minister, well-off and with a loving wife. All this is threatened when Mrs Cheveley appears in London with damning evidence of a past misdeed. Sir Robert turns for help to his friend Lord Goring, an apparently idle philanderer and the despair of his father. Goring knows the lady of old, and, for him, takes the whole thing pretty seriously.
Arrogant, self-centered movie director Guido Contini finds himself struggling to find meaning, purpose, and a script for his latest film endeavor. With only a week left before shooting begins, he desperately searches for answers and inspiration from his wife, his mistress, his muse, and his mother.
An ensemble cast telling 10 stories with intertwining characters. One story is about a father and son who are dating the same woman . Another features a woman who long ago gave her baby up for adoption but is now being blackmailed by a documentary filmmaker who claims to know the now-grown child's whereabouts.
A filmmaker recalls his childhood, when he fell in love with the movies at his village's theater and formed a deep friendship with the theater's projectionist.
When the popular, restless Landon Carter is forced to participate in the school drama production he falls in love with Jamie Sullivan, the daughter of the town's minister. Jamie has a "to-do" list for her life and also a very big secret she must keep from Landon.
Melodrama about two girls whose fortunes run on very different paths.
This is a bizarre film, almost completely melodramatic. The screenplay by Howard Koch is based on the 1941 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title by Ellen Glasgow.Completed in 1942 after the US had joined the war, the film was disapproved in 1943 for foreign release by the wartime Office of Censorship, because it dealt truthfully with racial discrimination as part of its plot. It was Huston's second movie and as he put it: “It was the first time [in an American film], I believe, that a black character was presented as anything other than a good and faithful servant or comic relief.”.
Davis and Rains shine in a romantic melodrama set in the world of concert music. Davis is a pianist torn between her wealthy, jealous patron and her cellist husband.
A dramatization of the turbulent first years of Queen Victoria's rule, and her enduring romance with Prince Albert.
An aspiring young physician, Robert Merivel found himself in the service of King Charles II and saves the life of someone close to the King. Merivel joins the King's court and lives the high life provided to someone of his position. Merivel is ordered to marry his King's mistress in order to divert the queens suspicions. He is given one order by the king and that is not to fall in love. The situation worsens when Merivel finds himself in love with his new wife. Eventually, the King finds out and relieves Merivel of his position and wealth. His fall from grace leaves Merivel where he first started. And through his travels and reunions with an old friend, he rediscovers his love for true medicine and what it really means to be a physician.

© Valossa 2015–2024