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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 |
 "Wonderful inspiration for any artist"Words cannot describe the technical beauty and artistic vision that haunts this movie. Presenting his life in four titled chapters, while the action is accompanied by the mesmeric music of Philip Glass, this movie conveys no so much a vision of his life as much as it gives the viewer a taste of his existence. Recommended for any one interested in Japanese art, warrior tradition and the dark depths of the human psyche. "A brave and weird film about a brave and weird man"While much of the late-60s/early-70s US brat-pack film-makers have either gone on to commercial sugar (Lucas, Spielberg) or leftfield crankiness (Coppola and, increasingly, Scorsese), Paul Schrader has quietly gone on making his odd, dark, personal movies. "Mishima" will probably go down as his best film. A lot of people watch it and enjoy it without making the connection that this director is the guy who wrote "Taxi Driver", and yet the continuity is there. The film is a two-hour, formally immaculate meditation on the life and work - and the degree to which the two things merged - of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Mishima himself was a contradictory character, an ebullient and dedicated family man who flaunted his homosexuality and his morbid interest in sex'n'death, and if he hadn't been born then Schrader would probably have invented him. Cinematographer John Bailey deserves some credit for the boldness of the film's three different styles: solemn black and white for the passages of Mishima's biography, lurid colour for the dramatisations of selected Mishima works, and tense natural colour for the framing device, the last hours of Mishima's life, in which he unsuccessfully attempted to incite an Army mutiny before cutting his stomach open in the garrison commander's office. Ken Ogata is powerfully present in the title role, even if he doesn't look remotely like Mishima. Schrader later ruefully admitted that Ogata's persona in Japan is more associated with genial comedy and good-guy roles than with driven artist-heroes, but it seemed that nobody else would take the role - so hats off to Ogata, then, for having the courage. Also excellent are Kenji Sawada, Yasosuke Bando and Toshiyuki Nagashima as Mishima's fictional alter-egos. The "fiction" bits are the most striking visually. Schrader and his production designer Eiko Ishioka go for a deliberate theatricality; the sets are blatantly stylised, as if for theatre (Mishima was also a successful playwright and incorrigible self-dramatist unto the end) and some of the film's most startling moments are in the final fictional excerpt, a highly condensed version of Mishima's penultimate novel, Runaway Horses. Yet the other two styles are beautifully considered. The silvery monochrome of the bio sections - the closest it comes to being your standard biopic - recall the serene repose of classic Japanese directors like Ozu and Mizoguchi, especially in the bits about Mishima's early life. The jerky, hand-held feel of the Last Day sequences is a sort of homage to the best work of Costa-Gavras; the quivering present-tense is the best way to convey what was basically an aborted terrorist attack. Philip Glass' music seems for once both apt and moving. Normally minimalism annoys...me, but in the context of a story about a deeply obsessive man, it's dead on. Schrader's brother Leonard co-wrote the screenplay and is apparently the real expert in the family on Japan. Either way, it's hard to think of another American film-maker who would go so far to try and understand a foreign culture, and make the effort to be so faithful to it. (Thumbs up to George Lucas and Francis Coppola, then, who co-produced it.) If "Mishima" seems in the end like an American film, it's in the context of Schrader's own work as a writer and director. He has always been fascinated by driven, violent outsiders, so Mishima must have seemed the perfect subject, a highly intelligent man who was fully aware of his own capacity for violence and who, in the end, opened himself up to it as what must have seemed the fulfilment of his life. We can never, now, read Mishima's works without knowing how he died, and this, presumably, was the point. It's interesting that his most illustrious writer friend, the Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, committed suicide only a few years after Mishima's death, as if in abjection towards his wilder, younger colleague. It's a beautiful and disturbing film, deeply unfashionable (I defy you to think of 6 other great films that came out in 1985) and truly memorable. It deserves better than to be on sale for 80 dollars. It cost me 17 quid in a Dublin video shop. ""Poetry written with a splash of blood""Director Paul Schrader uses three interwoven films to tell the life of the eccentric Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. The film opens with the last day of his life - the day he committed seppuku after siezing Army headquarters - in color and on location. Scenes from Mishima's early life appear in black-and-white, and dramatizations of his novels are presented on luminous, eerie stage sets designed by Eiko Ishiosha. Everything is underscored by Philip Glass's portentous and driving music that makes the events of Mishima's life seem inevitable. Mishima was disgusted with modern bourgeouis Japan, and like many other writers, sought to break out of the subdued emotional mileau of democratic capitalism into something more intense via sex and politics. The sex was S&M and homosexuality, and the politics were of the most rabid form of monarchism. The music and the imagery work together to produce a hint of the sense of dissociation that one experiences in such extremes. It seems almost that Mishima is being driven, albeit willingly, by a powerful force to his final end. The Schrader's (Paul, Leonard, and Chieko) have done as well as any biographer to provide insight into Mishima. Ken Ogata is a fine Mishima despite being considerably more heavy-set than the delicate-featured writer. Even if one knows nothing about Mishima, the film is a fascinating and hypnotic experience. 'Mishima' is one of the best films I've seen, and I'm frustrated that it's not available on DVD yet. Incidentally, the best book of Mishima's to read first is the autobiographical 'Confessions of a Mask' "Epic, noy always easy, but brilliant"It has been said that perhaps only a non-Japanese could provide an assessment of the life of Yukio Mishima, the man modern Japan wants desperately to forget. For the majority of his life he played two roles to his own country: the brilliant, best-selling author and the clownish gadfly who exposed, inadvertently or not, some of Japan's touchiest issues. And then one November day in 1970, he went with a group of his cronies to visit a Japanese Self-Defense Forces general in private, held the man hostage, demanded to speak to the soldiers garrisoned there, and harangued them for half an hour to rise up and retake Japan for their emperor. He was jeered at and ignored. When he went back into the building, he muttered "I'm not even sure they heard me" (which was in fact quite true, since most of his words had been obscured by the press and police helicopters), and then proceeded to commit ritual suicide. The word on everyone's lips: why? Paul Schrader has made a movie which does not provide us with an easy answer to that question. He could have, actually; any number of pseudo-Freudian ruminations would have done the trick. But rather than settle for something as simple as explain, he has done something even more challenging and artistically fascinating. His movie "Mishima" attempts to recreate the inside of Mishima's mind, through events in his life and scenes from his fiction. Real life is in flat black and white; the dramatic moments are in blazing Technicolor, with Expressionistic sets and daring camerawork. Mishima presents something of a problem for anyone trying to do an objective analysis, since he seemed to openly delight in frustrating people. Born to a smothering, possessive mother and a mostly absent father, he grew up certain that he was going to die at any moment. When WWII came, he was declared 4-F and thus denied the chance to die gloriously for his country (and it's no small secret to the audience that his suicide may have been a way of reliving that frustrated feeling). After college, he began writing fulltime and quickly became the most important post-WWII writer in Japan. Obsessed with death, his own homosexuality and what he saw as Japan's capitulations to the West, he challenged as many of his readers as he could with these notions. As his sentiments drifted more and more towards explicit, fanatic nationalism, his writing in turn reflected that: less literary work and more essays expounding on the glories of noble youth sacrificing themselves for the rising sun. Most people shrugged, and they were doubly perplexed when he created the "Shield Society," a hand-picked crew of young paramilitaries designed to aid the Emperor if the need arose. All of this and more is dramatized in the film, which is assembled with great care and power. Rather than tell everything chronologically, the film moves back and forth through time, running excerpts from his novels parallel to each other and building them together to an emotional, rather than strictly chronological climax. The effect is far more overpowering than a straightforward front-to-back run-through of his life. Roy Scheider's surgically precise narration lends the film even more gravity. The whole thing is wrapped up in a pulsating, mirrorlike Philip Glass score. The movie isn't for everyone. Many people will no doubt be perplexed by Mishima -- but then again, so was Japan itself. For those who are interested in a real movie, one with courage and genuine artistic insight, look no further -- and it's great to have it back in print and in widescreen, no less. "this, my original introduction 2 mishima & philip glass. . ."is even better than i remembered :) the fascinating subject; the satisfying structure of its four-chapter organization; the lively contrast & interplay of the three simulataneous thread-elements (b&w past, color present & eiko ishioka-stylized novel segments); the rigorous, propulsive, kronos quartet-performed glass score (some of which was Not on the cd release, conFOUND it!); the obvious relish ken ogata pours into his portrayal; and even the unobtrusive roy scheider narration, make this flick a thoroughly competent, absorbing tour-de-force of a sort we rarely get. clear-eyed yet heady- vt |
