A character in the new film by Peter Greenaway (The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) expresses the view that the two greatest sources of pleasure in life are literature and the body. That it pretty much requires the medium of film to explore the space where these two pleasures meet is a sentiment unspoken in The Pillow Book, but it carries out the task effectively. Vivian Wu is the beautiful daughter of a writer; she has literary ambitions herself, but her preferred means of expression is the art of writing on flesh. In time, she falls in love with Ewan McGregor (Trainspotting), the employee and lover of the self-serving publisher who has dominated her life. As is to be expected with Greenaway, The Pillow Book is more often an intellectual exercise than an emotional one, with all the entwined metaphors for sex, creation, art, and capitalism of an academia-friendly novel. However, the sense of cerebral detachment that has pervaded his work in the past, while still present, doesn't overwhelm here, and the interesting visuals—the director seems to have been inspired by his television's "picture in picture" feature—even occasionally border on the sensual, as opposed to the merely dazzling. After the pitch-dark misanthropy explored in 1993's The Baby Of Macon (still unreleased in the U.S.), Greenaway has made a surprisingly humane, satisfying film.