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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 |
 "Fantastic"Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Directed by Paul Schrader. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. Made in 1985. Cost $4.5million to make, filmed entirely in Japanese with all Japanese actors, never released in Japan. Grossed $500,000. Beautiful film that tells three separate stories. One is a black and white re-telling of Mishima's life. Another is a color re-telling of Mishima's last day. And the third consists of three re-tellings of Mishima's novels. The novel re-tellings are shot like very elaborate stage plays in lavish colors and designed by Eiko Ishioka, who designed costumes for Dracula, The Cell, and the new Houston Rockets jersey. Long story short, I bought this film sight unseen and I cannot stop thinking about it. The music haunts me (in a pleasant way), and the images and the ideas of Mishima have been playing in my mind. I had read two novels of Mishima's, so I was familiar with him and his work. Here is a man, arguably the greatest postwar author Japan has had, who wrote 35 novels, over a dozen plays, several operas, a ballet, over 400 short stories and essays, directed and starred in a movie he wrote, and starred in a few more. And in 1970, at the age of 45, after creating his own army, committed suicide after a vein attempt to incite revolution in the Army. Oh, he was also a body builder. Just like the deafness in Beethoven, it is the army building and suicide that everybody obsesses about when they study Mishima. It is true for the last decade of his life he tipped to the right in political views to the point of fervent fanaticism, but he still managed to balance his passion with his desire for beauty and existence. In the end he hoped to unify it all in one swift moment that is death. Known to go out on the town or host cocktail parties with the who's who of Tokyo and the literary world of the 50's and 60's, Mishima never drank and rarely took to debauchery that personifies the tragic novelist. Instead he possessed a phenomenal work ethic. At 11:00pm, whether on the town, or the host of a party, people knew it was time for Mishima to head home, or for the party end. He had work to do. Even while cramming for exams as a teenager, Mishima would stay up until dawn writing. His one passion at that age. And for the last twenty years of his life, at midnight, he would go to his study and write. No distractions, silence would guide his thoughts. Most of this I got from reading a biography I just read of him, but the film touches upon it very nicely. And it is the quotes about his personal development that make some of the best lines from the film (in an optional English narration on the DVD.) "Every night at precisely midnight I would return to my desk and write. I would analyze why I was attracted to a particular theme. I would boil it into abstraction until I was ready to put it down on the page." I think I just miss quoted (as I will again later), but I got it close enough. Even on the last night of his life he followed this work ethic. In his entire writing career, he never missed a deadline. He was a weak kid. Pale, young looking for his age. Sheltered by his grandmother. His one release was writing. In a scene that was objected to by his widow, the film shows him at a gay bar. He is criticized by a man for being "flabby". This scene and the implied homosexuality resulted in his widow preventing the release if the film in Japan. The following scene concludes with Mishima thinking: "All my life I had suffered under a monstrous sensitivity." And that, "What I lacked was a healthy body; a sense of self." "I saw that beauty and ethics are one in the same. Creating a beautiful work of art and being beautiful oneself are inseparable" Mishima took up body building in the mid 1950's and kept it up until the end of his life. Unlike the average tale of the forlorn, drunk, self-hating author, Mishima was obsessed with health and the prevention of the decay of the body. The reputation of famous authors of Japan are that of chain smokers who drink and write. It is this lifestyle that gives them their writing will. I have found two Japanese authors who buck this trend. One is Mishima and the other is Murakami Haruki, who is in his fifties right now and is possibly the most popular author in contemporary Japan. He too follows a strict ethic of exercise and writing. Though one issue I do have is that Ogata Ken, the actor who plays Mishima, doesn't really look like him. Mishima was just more handsome. His face was tough, but the eyes were the eyes of a poet. And he was more muscular for the last 15 years of his life. But considering the controversial nature of Mishima and his reputation, it was hard to find an actor as willing as Ogata, so I should not be so upset. Plus Paul Schrader made a comentary track for the DVD release that is full of good tidbits. "An Amazing Story, Brilliantly Told"Reading the reviews of "Mishima - A Life in Four Chapters" on this site got me interested enough to finally rent the movie, despite its goofy-looking cover and a general sense that it might prove to be dull. As it turns out, this is one of the most powerful films I've ever seen. Mishima was a famous Japanese writer who tried to live his beliefs. In the end, he became a character from his own novels, merging art with life. The film is told by inter-cutting scenes from his life (filmed in black and white, like an old Japanese film), scenes from three of his novels (brightly colored, very theatrically performed) and the final day of his life. The transitions from scene to scene are thematically and cinematically chosen, so that you see how the events of his life were reflected in his stories, and how the ideas in his stories later found expression in his life. The only movie I can compare this to is Fellini's 8 1/2, although it's quite different from that, of course. But both films are about the thin line separating one's art from one's actual life and both films utilize thematic transitions from the past, fantasy, and "reality." When you're done watching this movie, be sure to watch it a second time with the director's commentary. His stories about the making of the film and why it was never shown in Japan are fascinating. In the end, as he says, it was a film financed by nobody, made to be seen by nobody. Damn good flick!  "Beautiful things they are my enemies"Perhaps Paul Schraeder should have kept Mishima's words in mind when he wrote and directed this disaster of an art movie. The central concept of the movie is an abomination. Imagine telling the life of Shakespeare, or any other writer, by intercuting three of his plays or books into his life-story? Imagine 15 minutes being given each to Richard III, The Merchant of Venice and Midsummer Night's Dream. Each of Mishima's books highlighted in the movie is a full work of art in their own right. To shoehorn them into this movie is a travesty. To try to use them to tell Mishima's story is weak storytelling. To hide it in glitsy visuals is even worse. It almost works in the Runaway Horses section, but by that time, we have been bored into submission and any morsel of entertainment is gladly welcome. I had heard so much about the wonderfully stylised sets but they looked like a school play, with the acting in the Golden Pavillion segment at almost at the same level. Each of the book sections has zero character development and we have very little idea why the characters are motivated. This is compounded by the strange choice to film the book sequences in Japanese -- they could easily have been done in English. Arty talk may sound good, but it is empty of meaning when taken out of context. Shrader seems to mistake art for a good story and Mishima was popular primarily because he was a good storyteller. Ken Ogata is miscast -- he looks nothing like Mishima whatsover and is too old for the role. The actor who was the lead in the Runaway Horses section looks much more like Mishima. Mishima's character suffers from lack of character development. We see what he does but there is very little explanation of his motivation. The flashbacks skim over his life and give no insight. We never see him interact with anyone in a meaningful way. We never see any challenges he faced. There is a total lack of dramatic tension because his character have not been built up. Shrader says on the commentary that Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver and Mishima are similar characters but then he lets us think that Mishima acts the way he does because he is Japanese. Roy Shneider or not, the narration is a joke. I almost laughed out loud when I heard it. Why is an AMERICAN doing the voiceover? It looks and sounds ridiculous and completely jars with the visuals. When I first started watching I mistakenly had the narration off and was reading the English subtitles -- much better. The tone of the narrator was enough to send anyone to sleep. And the words, even though they are Mishima's, are preposterous in the context of a movie. The whole thing plods along at such a tedious pace, not helped by the score, which like all Philp Glass, sounds pretty but has no tension. If you like pretty colors then perhaps you can forgive the book sequences, but the use of black and white is misleading as many of the events depicted are close to the last day (for example the parade on the roof of the National Theater). The "documentary style" of the last day looks cheap, forced and is not dynamic enough for the material. The filmmakers can't even make a hostage taking look interesting. The DVD extras include a "making of" that must be all of five minutes long that adds nothing to our understanding of Mishima or of the movie. All in all a missed opportunity to understand of one of the most intriguing writers of the 20th century.  "A revealing film"It struck me whilst watching Mishima that the film has a very clear, but perhaps unintentional, interpretation of his behaviour in his final years. Mishima's decision to re-focus his life away from what he came to see as an artificial world of words to the real world of action and was, in fact, simply replacing one artistic activity with another. His final actions were performance art. Assesed objectively they served no genuine policital or social purpose at all. A film worth watching for anybody interested in Mishima's work or Japanese culture. "Literature meets cinema"With its multiple timeframes, minimalist aesthetic, and intercut dramatized extracts from Mishima's novels, on paper this film sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. But in the hands of Paul Schrader, this ambitious fusion of literature and cinema is nothing less than a joy. Few films cover so much ground, philosophically or biographically, let alone with such economy and flair. Paul and Leonard Schrader's screenplay is perfect, Ken Ogata is masterful as Mishima, and Philip Glass's now-classic score lends everything a powerfully tragic tone. Ironically, in the end this most complex of projects plays like a very simple story, and succeeds in not only in making us feel for Mishima but also has us understanding the personal and ideological forces which drove him. In a bio-pic, you can't ask for more than that. (NOTE: Roy Scheider's narration has been replaced in the DVD edition, so fans of the VHS be warned.) |
