Mishima - A Life in Four Chapters

Starring:Ken Ogata, Masayuki Shionoya, Hiroshi Mikami, Junya Fukuda, Shigeto Tachihara, Junkichi Orimoto, Naoko Otani, GÃ´ RijÃ», Masato Aizawa, Yuki Nagahara, Kyuzo Kobayashi, Yuki Kitazume, Haruko Kato, Yasosuke Bando, Hisako Manda, Naomi Oki, Miki Takakura, Imari Tsujikoichi Sato, Kenji Sawada, Reisen Lee
Director: Paul Schrader
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product Type: DVD

Description

An acclaimed and auspicious biography of an infamous and brilliant Japanese author who performed ritual seppuku in 1970.

Customer Reviews:

IS THIS BEING RELEASED ON CRITERION?.......2007-04-25

i heard on imdb that this movie is being released under criterion. is this true? this is one of my favorite movies, and i think this is more deserved of a criterion release than many criterion releases.

i tried to email criterion to ask them, but, like always, i get no response whatsoever. ask them a simple question as friendly as possible and they act like you've said nothing.

ah well.. does anyone know if this film is being released on criterion?

Harmony of Pen and Sword.......2007-04-20

The film, original and hypnotizing depicting of the fascinating Artist's life through his writings, works, especially in the first two chapters, "Beauty" and "Art". They are nothing short of perfection if you ask me. Amazing blend of three different styles - quasi documentary of the last day in his life, black-and-white flashbacks of his earlier days and exiting and stylish color sequences of his novels "The Temple of Golden Pavilion" and "Kyoko's House" helps to understand the constant and tragic search of Mishima's protagonists for beauty and for meaning of art. Two last chapters, "Action" and "Harmony of Pen and Sword" seem weaker than the first two. Two hours are not enough to explore the figure of such complexity but the attempt is very interesting and adds to my interest in Mishima - a great writer, actor, director, a military man, a man who felt that he knew where the future of his country lied and who did not hesitate a second to die for his ideas.

5 star reviews? PLEASE. One star reviews? Not fair........2005-11-21

"Mishima" is at once fascinating but also very frustrating. It is without a doubt, art-house cinema at its best and worst.

The basic technique of this film, although very bold, does not work as a storytelling device effectively. It in fact seems to be apeing Japanese dramatic rigidity, but in a pandering way. Mishima is given virtually no context for us to place him, no dramatic arc, almost nothing. The biographical sketches are some of the most fragmented and frustrating I've ever seen; there is virtually no dramatic tension. We receive interesting morsels from his writings, and taken together they start to clarify the mess of what is on screen. So we are then left with the other elements of the film to pick up the pieces....

Eiko Eishioka's production design is distracting in the extreme, almost to the point of being overwhelmingly obnoxious. "Mishima's" blue saran-wrap bathrobe at the opening is the first instance of this jarring aesthetic, but it builds to a grating climax in the dramatized portions of his books. This is "black-turtleneck" artsy-fartsiness at its worst. It detracts from the story and is another painfully obvious reminder of Schrader's attempts to do something indigenously Japanese.

Similarly, Philip Glass's score is so overweening that it has to be remembered in the annals of cinema. It has a certain hypnotic quality to it -- by virtue of entire bars being repeated ad nauseum. There are some truly beutiful moments held within -- but every time a crescendo hits -- YIKES. And the "militaristic" drum rolls that accompany the documentarian last day are downright silly.

Last, but not least, is Ogata Ken. He has a magnetic on-screen presence. Unfortunately, he is also horribly miscast, his face a literal mask throughout the film. The last thing in the world he comes across as is a famous writer, and of course looks not a thing like Mishima.

Alas, it is not a forgotten gem but a deeply flawed film that looks none the better, and perhaps worse with th DVD treatment.

An original mystery of a man.......2005-07-11

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.

An amazing film but..........2005-02-11

..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.

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