Still banned in Japan, 4 decades later Mishima is as thought provoking and relevant as ever!
Recently Criterion released Paul Schrader’s best film in my opinion on 4K UHD, his fifth directorial outing 1985’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. The film is a experimental biopic focusing on Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist and ultranationalist – Yukio Mishima (Ken Ogata). Like most of Schrader’s best protagonists was a fascinating self destructive extremist – who would meet his end committing seppuku after a failed coup d’état. While biopics are traditionally self-serving and more from the outsider’s perspective, Mishima uses a rather imaginative approach to the writer’s own works to delve into his innermost ID, in a film that to this day is still banned in Japan. This is primarily due to both Mishima’s widow, and threats from right-wing groups due to the film’s portrayal of Mishima’s homosexuality, that the author himself wrote about in his own semi-autobiographical tome Confessions of a Mask.
When asked about what Japan thought of Mishima immediately after his death, the famous quote was “ask again in 15 years.” Well it’s been 55 years and Japan still isn’t ready to deal with him.
The film’s story which is told in four chapters, each paired with a different book – starts on the morning of the failed coup as Mishima gathers his 4 most loyal true believers, to make their way to the headquarters of the Eastern Command of the Japanese Self-Defense Force. Once that storyline is set into motion the film jumps from present day, back to Mishima’s childhood, and then in Schrader’s most inspired move — uses the writer’s own works to help reinforce the experiences that got the award winning scribe to that point. These sequences with production design by Eiko Ishioka – who created some amazing poster artwork (see below), are depicted through stage plays transpiring in a surrealist candy colored alternate reality, a play within a play, within the film, essentially. These heavily contrast with the film’s World War 2 era flashbacks that are shot in gritty newsreel-ish black and white, and stick closer to reality.
These colorful sequences are a chaotic peek into the writer’s mind as his characters romanticize possibility of death from above thanks to US bombings that would allow them to escape their day to day doldrums and contemplating suicide to stay beautiful forever. Schrader masterfully pulls key passages that perfectly illustrate how his vanity and extremist fixation on traditional values were more products of ego, guilt and delusions of grandeur, than the betterment of Japanese society. The director immediately hones in on how Mishima feigning tuberculosis to dodge deployment in WW2, which led him to a life of guilt and in his eyes dishonor to Japan. This was thanks to Japanese propaganda weaponizing the ancient Samurai honor code of Bushido on its people during WW2, making self sacrifice the only acceptable alternative to absolute victory.
Mishima was a product of that guilt, similar to Kōichi Shikishima in Godzilla Minus One, which tackles the guilt, grief and shame instilled in those left to rebuild. But instead of discovering a different path in life, he stayed the course, forming a militia that looked to renounce the ways of the west and return to a simpler time. A reason for this anti-western sentiment is hinted at when Mishima laments that only one of his books has been translated abroad, and only into six languages no less. No doubt he perceived this as a slight to his work; and also fueled his isolationist mid-century red pill ideology. There’s a lot of parallels here you can draw between Mishima and other extremist, fascist leaders and ideologies, but I think deep in his heart, he knew ultimately that his own country would eventually reject him. Rather than stop him, he would use it to fuel a bizarre form of martyrdom, which you can see fetishized in the writer’s own 30 Minute silent film he submitted to Cannes, Patriotism, that he wrote, directed and starred in – and was also released by Criterion!
The film, follows a soldier who gruesomely commits seppuku to avoid having to kill his fellow soldiers. The film fetishizes the act in a way that you would expect Schrader to have done given his love of violence, which he surprisingly avoids, which is in itself shocking because of how grotesque things got for Mishima and company after he plunged his sword into his abdomen. While Schrader wisely chose to tread lightly on that aspect of his ritualistic suicide, he doesn’t miss a step highlighting another Mishima text, where a character states that “after 40, you’re just watching your body decompose”, when romanticizing suicide to stay young forever. When Mishima attempted his coup, he was 45 years old and not only was he in peak physical condition, but he was also at the height of his fame as well.
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is easily Schrader’s best work. This is not just because the narrative is just meticulously assembled and executed on screen in its reality vs written work structure, but aided by a rather unnerving score by Phillip Glass. What I appreciated was instead of attempting to simplify him, Schrader takes us even further down the rabbit hole with him as he deconstructs his subject with the care and attention he deserves. But unlike most of Schrader’s other protagonists Mishima was a very real person, and you feel the specificity that is put into exploring every nuance of the man’s life on screen with some rather expertly interleaved flourishes and moments. He’s careful to strike a very clear balance of not only the genius, but the madness it manifested in its wake.
Keeping with Criterion UHD standard, one disc is just the film presented flawlessly in 4K, with the extras included on Blu-ray. Strangely enough Schrader is nowhere to be seen on this disc and I think it was a smart move by Criterion to give the director some distance from his controversial subject. Known for dropping some choice statements from time to time, I think keeping the director out of this conversation keeps him from saying something that might be interpreted as being too sympathetic or in admiration of his problematic subject’s political leanings, instead recordings with Mishima are wisely included. That said, Mishima is a fascinating subject that brought the best out in the director, who has made a career of peering into these darker corners of humanity. While Mishima was easily a genius, he was an extremely troubled one, that was eventually overcome by his own ego.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
- 4K digital restoration of the director’s cut, supervised and approved by director Paul Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey, with 2.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- Two alternate English narrations, including one by actor Roy Scheider
- Audio commentary featuring Schrader and producer Alan Poul
- Program on the making of the film featuring Bailey, producers Tom Luddy and Mata Yamamoto, composer Philip Glass, and production designer Eiko Ishioka
- Program on Yukio Mishima featuring his biographer John Nathan and friend Donald Richie
- Audio interview with coscreenwriter Chieko Schrader
- Interview excerpt from 1966 featuring Mishima talking about writing
- The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima, a 1985 documentary about the author
- Trailer
- PLUS: An essay by critic Kevin Jackson, a piece on the film’s censorship in Japan, and photographs of Ishioka’s sets
