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Mishima - A Life in Four Chapters Actors: Philip Glass, Ken Ogata, Masayuki Shionoya Director: Paul Schrader Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Anamorphic Widescreen Format: Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Running Time: 120 minutes Studio: Warner Studios Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1 Region Code: 1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2001-08-07 Buy from Amazon |
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From Description An acclaimed and auspicious biography of an infamous and brilliant Japanese author who performed ritual seppuku in 1970. |
 "the narration confusion..I think it's the same"I'm rather confused about all these discussions about the narration being "changed", and apparently, so is Paul Schrader himself. I have not seen the film at the original release, but as for the difference between the fromer VHS editions of the film and this new DVD... the only difference about the narration is...that Ken Ogata's narration in Japanese can now be heard, which is great. The English-narrated sound track is...the SAME. I first saw the film in an old VHS in a university class, and THE ENGLISH NARRATION WAS ALREADY THE SAME AS IT CAN BE HEARD ON TRACK ONE OF THIS DVD: "flat and matter-of-fact" as Mr.Schrader describes. As a matter of fact, I did not recognize that it was Roy Scheider, though it was certainly his voice. This is very good for the film, since we are supposed to be listening to Mishima's inner reflection on his own life. It cannot be "acted out" loudly, since Mishima that we see in the film --especially in the main narrative line of it which is Mishima's last day ending with his suicide-- is always acting himself, rather flamboyantly. So the director Paul Schrader's choice of asking the actor not to "play" it, but making an "effort was made to keep the narrative flat and matter-of-fact" was very suitable for the mystery of the film. Personally, I first did not like the narration being in English, then I started to feel that the very flat narration in a different language may be representing another dimention of Mishima's split personality that Schrader is exploring in the film. But watching the film with Ken Ogata's narration was a revelation. The film definetely looks more complete with the Japanese narration. And Ogata did not need an English speaking narrator to represent this split, complex and enigmatic personality who is Yukio Mishima. It's far stroger to see the same actor incarnating those many personalities, and it also make far more sense. The DVD is also on 1:1.85 aspect ratio, which is a huge improvement to 4:3 VHS, since now we can really appreciate John Bailey's extremely pricise framings and compositions. I have never been crazy about Eiko Ishioka's production design. Even for this film, when I first saw it I was interesting but not great, but Bailey's 1:1.85 framing really brings out the essence of the stories from her sets (though I still don't like them). Of course a DVD has better image clarity than a VHS, plus the correct framing, plus Ken Ogata's own voice...the DVD edition is the best way to see the film. And Mr. Schrader's commentary is very interesting and enjoyable (as he always is; one of the best director to do commentaries), including the horrifying story of the true reason why the film was banned in Japan. Very scary but very realistic for us Japanese. Nevertheless, MISHIMA is a very interesting film but not the best among Schrader's works as director. My favorite one is AFFLICTION, and though Schrader himself dislikes the film saying the experience was a "nightmare", BLUE COLLAR.  "paul schrader reply"Someone pointed out to me confusion about the change in the narration. Here's the story. I originally intended to have Mishima's narration in English outside Japan to cut down on the surfeit of subtitles. (The US version of Diary of a Country Priest has French dialogue and English narration.) I asked Roy Scheider to read a transdlation of the Ogata/Mishima narration and we mixed this into the film at Lucasfilm. The Japanese distributor was to be responsible for mixing Ken Ogata's narration into the Japanese version. However, there never was a Japanese version since the film was de facto banned in Japan. Consequently, it was never possible for non-English speaking Japanese viewers to see the film entirely in Japanese. When the DVD was issued we went back to Lucasfilm to fix this, allowing either a Japanese-speaking viewer to hear the Ogata narration or a non-Japanese-speaking viewer to hear the Scneider narration. In recording both Ogata and Scneider an equal effort was made to keep the narrative flat and matter-of-fact. Paul S. "A question for Paul Schrader? "While it's always good for an author - or in this case a director - to respond directly on amazon (OK one might make an exception for Anne Rice's bizarre outbursts and for the various authors and publishers who submitted pseudonymous reviews to puff up their star ratings), Paul Schrader's comment a few posts below left me no wiser about what happened to the narration. In the original film and VHS video release this was read by Roy Scheider in a wonderful smoky voice that perfectly fitted the material. Judging by the reviews below (I don't have this version myself), this has been mysteriously replaced by a much inferior voiceover for the DVD. Paul's comment seems to indicate that Lucasfilm re-recorded the narration for this DVD so that it included Ken Ogata's version in Japanese (a good thing as the film was not properly released in Japan first time round because of the Mishima estate's opposition and presumably the difficult political subject matter). So did they get Roy to do it again in English (and apparently so badly - or at least differently - that most reviewers who mention it don't think it's him)? After all the great advantage of DVD technology over video is that you can have multiple soundtracks and subtitles. So Paul - please clarify further? I love this film (thus the 5-stars) but I am probably not the only fan who is having second thoughts about buying this edition based on the reviews below. Even if you didn't like the original narration - which puts it into 'director's cut' territory - it would still help if you explained this more clearly, so we know what we are buying and why it differs from the movie we saw in the cinema back in the 1980s. "An amazing film but..."..could someone give us a definite answer as to if Roy Scheider's haunting narration is missing or not? I refuse to buy this DVD if that has been altered. "An original mystery of a man"This visually strong DVD on the life of Mishima was divided into three interwoven chapters; there is a black and white retelling of Mishima's life; a color version of the last day of his life; and then a super-saturated color version of three abbreviations of his novels. I think these three sections actually allow a good armature on which to review the film and to comment on the artist's life and gifts to literature. The life of Mishima, filmed in black and white, reveals many of the themes that continue to haunt both his fiction and his personal interactions. As a child, Mishima is told by his grandmother that he is special, a fragile hot-house plant, and that his family is better than common people. As a pre-adolescent he finds a picture of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows, and says that 'this painting had laid in wait for me for 300 years' and that his 'hand began a spontaneous motion that it had never been taught'. Thus Mishima himself gives us the key to understanding much of his work and life; he becomes obsessed with idealized male beauty and martyrdom. He begins the creative process early and is very prolific. He begins writing every night at midnight for a specified period of time, and maintained this routine throughout his life. He marries and has two children but he also has affairs with men. As he ages he becomes more obsessed with his body and becomes a body builder. He is humiliated beyond description by the Japanese loss of World War II. Eventually he develops a circle of beautiful male followers and forms his own private army. I have read two of his novels; The Golden Pavillion and Forbidden Colors. I must say his style is different in both. Golden Pavillion is written in a straight-forward style, much like Hemingway. Forbidden Colors is an odd retelling of Charles Dicken's Great Expectations but with a gay Estella seeking revenge against the female sex. The novel has a style much like Balzac in his novel Cousin Bette. Mishima is cognitively original, much like Emily Dickinson, because of his fluid imagination, odd associations of thoughts and images, and the deep desire to hide the repressed and the nasty inner-self from the viewer. You can't ready Mishima or Emily Dickinson without asking: "What deep dark secrets are they hiding?" Integrated into the film are three very stylized shortened versions of three of his novels that reflection on his consciousness. The first segment, the Golden Pavillion, deals with a young monk who stutters, finds he can't make love to women because visions of the Golden Pavillion Temple continue to appear in his mind. He eventually burns the 600 year old national landmark temple to the ground. But what is this really about? It is about the repressed homosexual who can not make love to women because the image of the idealized beautiful male continues to haunt his inner desires and visions. To try to destroy those visions is to destroy the self, something precious as an ancient temple. The second segment deals with a young beautiful male actor who becomes the lover of a female mobster slum lord (lady) to save his mother's coffee shop. Yet when they meet for love-making she slowly slices his beautiful body with razors as she admires his beauty. His first young mistress finds he responds to a mirrow when making love, obsessed with his own beauty. And how would a repressed homosexual deal with a beautiful male character in his novel? By violating that beauty, aiming the act of aggression outward instead of inward. The female mobster is Mishima, worshiping male beauty and wishing to destroy it at the same time. The last vision we see of the young actor is of his bound corpse, sliced and bleeding, yet with the restful face of St. Sebastian in a Renaissance painting. In the third segment, Running Horses, a group of beautiful young nationalistic young Japanese men plot the death of the democratically elected officials of Japan so the country can return to the ancient religion, culture, and government of Japan. This segment certainly reveals that Japanese Nationalism did not disappear after the Japanese surrender. In fact, these Japanese Nationalists would consider the loss of the war shameful and in the Japanese Sumari tradition, should commit suicide rather than live in shame. In the third Chapter of the film, we see Mishima on the last day of his life, surrounded by beautiful male soldiers from his private army. In 1970, at the age of 45, he commits ritual suicide as the act of an honorable samarai in response to the loss of the war by his nation. In a wild and almost unbelievable climax, Mishima and his officers kidnap the Minister of the Japanese Army and try to bring about a revolution against the current government, which is very much adjusted to Western influence. The soldiers that are addressed by Mishima are amazed at the destructive and unrealistic pleas of Mishima as were the Japanese college students in an earlier scene. The musical score by Phillip Glass is complimentary without being competitive. Mishima remains a puzzle inside an enigma but repressed homosexulity combined with self hatred certainly help explains why he surrounded himself with beautiful pure young men to whom he can impose his obsessed hyper-masculinity and ancient, tragically outdated code of life. |
