Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters - Criterion Collection (1985)

An artistic biography

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is a work of art. Depicting the life of Yukio Mishima, a controversial Japanese writer, who was considered for the Nobel Prize, this film delivers.

The film depicts the last hours of Mishima's life with flashbacks of his earlier days.

While the film is an American production, it is in the Japanese language. The film was too controversial to be released on home video in Japan, but has aired on television there. I thought is well made and especially so because of the score by Philip Glass which I think is a masterpiece. I have been a fan of his music for many years. The film has beautiful indoor sets and cinematography also.

As the film is based on the life of an actual person, I will skip the usual plot summary.

This release is far better than the earlier DVD release of the film and loaded with supplements.

Disc 1 contains the film with optional director's and producer's commentary, a theatrical trailer and the option of having the voice-over narration in Japanese or English

Disc 2 has a BBC documentary on Mishima, video interviews with John Bailey, Tom Luddy Mata Yamamoto, Philip Glass, Eiko Ishioka, Mishima biographer John Nathan, and Donald Richie, an audio interview with Chieko Schrader, and an archival video interview of Mishima himself.

This is the best edition of the film to get and I highly recommend it. August 23, 2008

Elegance & Brutality

Finally Criterion has gotten around to including one of my all time favorite films, Mishima. Directed by Paul Schrader and with beautiful set pieces by Ishioka Eiko, this is a truly great bio pic which Criterion has generoursly upgraded. This is the only bio pic I can think of that's based on a major modern Japanese author. It would be interesting to see other directors make films about Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Kafu. In Mishima you see his final day before committing seppuku as just another day and filmed in color. Then you switch to black and white shots of Mishima's childhood. Finally, there are the richly stylized set pieces that showcase Mishima's novels. Schrader does a great job of switching between these three separate time frames and you can see the influneces of Bresson, Dreyer, and Ozu. I won't go into the story details but once you start watching its hard to look away from Ogata Ken's intense protrayal.
The real treat for me was the special features, which are by themselves worth buying this edition for. There's an excellent 55-minute documentary by the BBC called The Strange Case of Mishima Yukio where you can see Donald Keene discuss the problems of translating Mishima's writing into English. It was great seeing Keene speaking when I'm so used to reading his books and various translated works.
Also, there is a great interview with Donald Richie and John Nathan who both knew Mishima and visited him in Tokyo. John Nathan wrote the excellent biography on Mishima (another good one is Mishima Into The Void by Marguerite Yourcenar.) A good interview with Chieko Schrader, who helped write the script and is the wife of Paul's brother, Leonard.
Also video interview with composer Philip Glass, set designer Ishioka, and the producers that show how much work and effort go into creating a film on such a grand scale.
Overall, its a very entertaining and informative look at a great modern writer, Japanese or otherwise, and is highly recommened to anyone interested in writing and Japanese culture.
August 16, 2008

Mishima: life and fiction

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is visually stunning and features a soundtrack by Phillip Glass. It's about the life of writer Yukio Mishima, and the film alternates between his last day - when he and his private army(!) of ultra-nationalists tried to take control of the japanese army and reinstall the emperor as ruler of Japan - earlier episodes (as a boy, teenager and so on), and filmed scenes from his novels. All in all, we get some insights of Mishimas way to self-realisation, as a writer and warrior, or something like that. The "past" is filmed in b/w, the "present" in color and the novels in very strong color shemes. Past, present and fiction is thus weaved together which actually works very well.

The transfer is remarkable as usual with Criterion, and the extras are overwhelming. Also, the case of the DVD is almost too much with metallic finish, strong colors and fold-out design. Five stars to Criterion for caring about movies and giving us films like this! July 23, 2008

Extraordinary does not even begin to describe how great Schrader's film is....

If someone said "I'm going to pitch a film about Yukio Mishima, a writer well known in Japan but only known to intellectuals here in America, to a Hollywood studio, get Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas to help me get it made, make it entirely in Japanese (except for some narration), and make it about the inner workings of the artist, not a straighforward biography", most would say that that person should be committed. Well, that's pretty much what Paul Schrader did, and he succeeded wildly beyond all expectations. Not only is this film one of the greatest biographies ever made, it really captures the essence of Mishima brilliantly. Yukio Mishima is a man that the term "complicated individual" was invented for. He was a poet, playwright, essayist, short story writer, novelist (which he is best known for), filmmaker (he made one film, Patriotism, which is now on DVD), body builder, Japanese patriot, believer in the Bushido code, and nationalist. He also committed suicide attempting (fruitlessly) to convince the Japanese army to restore Japan to the emperor. Instead of doing a straightforward biography, Paul Schrader gets inside of Mishima, and shows the immense complexity and genius that was his and his alone. The only film that I really compare this film to (just in technique and attitude) is Sergie Paradjanov's The Color of Pomegranates, which was about the Armerian poet Sayat Nova. That film isn't a straightforward biography, but a complex, esoteric film about the inner workings of the artist, much like this one. These two films couldn't be more different aesthetically, but they are almost identical in their approaches.

If Schrader made a decent film, you could say "well, he got the film made. It wasn't perfect, but that's OK. He tried to make something artistic". But that isn't the case. Not only did Schrader make this film with American financing, he made what is arguably his best film. Schrader is very erratic at times, doing great work (he wrote Taxi Driver), making decent films (Auto Focus), and making mediocre films (Hardcore and the lousy remake of Cat People). In this film, he's made his masterpiece. Everything works here, from the amazing cinematography to the brilliant score of Philip Glass (it's one of Glass's best scores, and that's saying something). This really is a remarkable piece of work. July 19, 2008

Yukio Mishima: the life of a complicated artist.

"I come out on the stage determined to make people weep. Instead, they burst out laughing"--Yukio Mishima.

Produced in Japan by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, and based on the life and fiction of controversial Japanese author Yukio Mishima (1925-1970) (who is perhaps best known in the U.S. for The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea), Paul Schrader's 1985 film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, chronicles Mishima's public, private and literary lives in four, crisp black and white "chapters" captioned "Beauty," "Art," "Action," and "Fusion of Pen and Sword," intercut with stylized, theatrical performances from three different Mishima novels: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956); Kyoko's House (1959); and Runaway Horses (1968). This is a truly splendid film about the life of a truly tortured artist. Throughout his life, Mishima viewed his life as a work of art. In the final sequence, just as Mishima's protagonists are shown achieving their self-destructive objectives, Mishima (played by Ken Ogata) simultaneously commits public "seppuku" (samurai-style suicide by disembowelment) on the last day of his life, November 25, 1970, thereby merging life and art. "All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence," Mishima's voice-over narrator explains. "For forty-five years I struggled to resolve this dilemma by writing plays and novels. The more I wrote, the more I realized mere words were not enough. So I found another form of expression." The film's superb soundtrack features original contributions by Philip Glass with performances by the Kronos Quartet. It is indeed surprising that Schrader, best known as the author of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo, was successful in bringing this expression of artistic genius to film.

The Criterion two-disc edition of this film features a newly-restored transfer of the director's cut, supervised and approved by director Paul Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey; optional English and Japanese voice-over narrations (by Roy Scheider and by Ken Ogata); audio commentary featuring Schrader and producer Alan Poul; video interviews with Bailey, producers Tom Luddy and Mata Yamamoto, composer Philip Glass, production designer Eiko Ishioka, Mishima biographer John Nathan and friend Donald Richie; a new audio interview with coscreenwriter Chieko Schrader; "The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima," a 55-minute BBC documentary about the author; the theatrical trailer; and a booklet featuring a new essay by critic Kevin Jackson, a piece on the film's censorship in Japan, and photographs of Ishioka's sets. Highly recommended.

G. Merritt May 8, 2008

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