Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters: The Criterion Collection

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Yukio Mishima was a charismatic, complex, and controversial figure with a life so full of contradictions and a death so spectacular and grotesque that there are many reasons to make a film about him. Paul Schrader´s fascination with Mishima stems from a simpler motivation: Mishima walked the walk.

Mishima was Japan´s best known and most celebrated writer at the time of his death. He was obsessed with ideas and ideals of beauty, a driving force in both his art and his relentless drive to perfect his own body. He was also an ardent nationalist, loyal to the Emperor and disgusted by what he saw as the decline of Japan´s military tradition. Unlike most artists and social critics, however, Mishima turned his fanatical beliefs into reality, finding the one place where he believed art and action met: death.

After transforming his frail "poet´s" body into the chiseled granite of a he-man gangster, Mishima founded his own personal army which was tolerated by a government who saw it either as useful or inconsequential. Culling the most loyal members from his private force, Mishima then staged a spectacular coup, albeit one with an extremely limited scope. He and four "soldiers" infiltrated the headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defense Force and took a general hostage. Mishima demanded the right to address the garrison, after which he committed suicide (seppuku).

Even while acknowledging the cultural differences in the perception of ritual suicide in Japan vs. other countries, Mishima´s act defies ready understanding. Was it an act of narcissism, heroism, or outright psychosis? Was it primarily motivated by political or aesthetic concerns? Even to attempt an answer to this question requires addressing an even more unanswerable question: Who was Yukio Mishima?

Paul Schrader, working from a script written by himself, brother Leonard Schrader and Leonard´s wife Chieko Schrader, splits his narrative attack into three different strategies. First, the story begins and ends with snippets of Mishima´s final day. Mixed in with this footage are flashbacks to Mishima´s earlier life, shot in black-and-white and starting (perhaps unfortunately) with his childhood as well as stage reenactments of several of Mishima´s key novels.

This strategy invites yet another question. Is it possible to "get to know" a writer through his writing, or do we simply get to know his writing? Particularly with someone like Mishima who was so concerned with both his self-image and his public image, there´s little way to know how to separate the art from the artist even in his autobiographical works which may be every bit as fictional as anything else. This question hangs over not only the staged reenactments, but also the footage from Mishima´s life in which he also serves as a narrator, most likely a very unreliable one.

If the film was judged solely by the degree to which it helps us "get to know" Mishima, it would be a failure, but Schrader (and Schrader and Schrader) have other concerns. Just as Mishima´s life was defined by his rigid sense of aesthetics, the film is similarly rigorous in its emphasis on color and surfaces. Each of the three strands has its unique color palette (as conceived by production designer Eiko Ishioka) and is composed of discrete set-pieces that function better as independent units than as part of a whole (though, by the mere fact that they are edited together, they are obviously connected.)

"Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters," shot by John Bailey, is an achingly beautiful film. This is a description applied to many movies, but the beauty of "Mishima" (much like that of Mishima himself) is unique. I first saw the film several years ago and my clearest memory was of one scene in which a group of soldiers sit inside a circle of what appear to be office cubical dividers as they plot an insurrection. Suddenly, the walls tumble like a house of cards as police forces attack with swords in a battle that is both bloody and extremely theatrical. The scenes with the re-creations of Mishima´s writing are defined even more by the tremendous amount of negative space on stage as by the exquisite sets; and the ethereal beauty of the black-and-white sequences provides a perfect balance to the concrete semi-documentary quality of Mishima´s grim march to death on his final day. The idiosyncratic and relentlessly repetitive score by Phillip Glass is formidable in its own right (it has been a popular seller on CD for the last 20 years) and adds yet another layer of strangeness to this film´s aesthetic design.

It´s hard not to see some parallels between Schrader´s treatment of Mishima and of Travis Bickle. Both men view the world through a narrow lens and rage at a society that fails to meet their standards. Even more aptly, viewers are inclined to mistake both men for heroes, a patently absurd notion in the case of Travis, and deeply troubling as regards Mishima. Mishima undoubtedly had the courage of his convictions as well as enormous talent, but he also left behind a grieving family and a shocked nation in a gesture so obviously futile that it seems unlikely he ever expected it to succeed in rousing the sleeping nation to his cause. Was he then the ultimate performance artist, truly giving it all for his craft? If so, it´s hardly something to be admired.

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