Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Mishima is a 1985 biographical movie by Paul Schrader on the life and death of Yukio Mishima.
It is a fantastic challenge to—not even survey, which would be impossible given the volume of his production—but even approach slightly the body of works of this unique writer. The movie could achieve this—at the price of a good familiarity from the audience with the works highlighted—by focusing on the symbolic atmosphere of key, iconic passages of his most famous novels. This casts the artwork in a theatrical more than cinematographic way, which however suits perfectly the novels. The themes can thus be recognized and given a context that it would be hopeless to provide otherwise. Thanks to this genius insight, therefore, and for those acquainted with the Author, the movie provides a coherent and meaningful picture, strengthened by the beautiful narrations of some of the author's most powerful texts. To an audience not versed in Mishima's work, however, the movie may be hard to follow and overall unclear, although the aesthetic of the three novels as it is rendered on the screen is so powerful that it might capture everybody's imagination one way or another. The break-in of Isao in Kuraha's house, for instance, with the outside and inside worlds merging through the light turning the forest into the salon's painting, is fantastic, as well as close to Mishima's Shintoist vision of the veiled, hidden worlds. The eroticism and exultation of the bodies, as well as their destruction, add to the grip of the visuals regardless of their connection to the biography and meaning of the work.
The movie is in Japanese, with Japanese actors. It is another tour de force from an American director who, however, rightly observed that «there is a tendency to say we can't understand Mishima because we're Americans. Believe me, the Japanese do not understand him either. He is as unfathomable to them, perhaps more so because they feel they should understand him, and we just assume we can't, and therefore we can understand him better.» [1]
The four chapters are three books and his final act, which was not a book, but his seppuku:
- Beauty - The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
- Art - Kyoko's House
- Action - Runaway Horses
- Harmony of pen and sword
The movie—which the director found his best directed one—manages to portrays effectively the beauty of the artistic introspections of Mishima through his novels, with stunning visuals and cinematographic effects with saturated colors in toy sets of the major themes, including a breathtaking dolly zoom with the golden pavilion:
This contrasts effectively with the black and white segments of Mishima's memories, as well as the realistic colors for the depictions of his real coup. These three palettes make for a dizzying mix between reality and fiction.
The blending of colours becomes that of a paint board under the rain—mixing everything as it dissolves—in the last part—harmony of pen and sword—which is where the fiction, memories and real life come together, and when Mishima becomes, not the observer, but the actor, of his life. His frustrated address to the guarison where he reminisces of his jet-fighter flight in the epilogue of Sun and Steel, narrated in the deafening soundtrack of Philip Glass, makes for a suffocating atmosphere that captures perfectly the apotheosis of his final moments, where his life and work finally meet and embrace in death. The colors then come back in his memories, the plane also enters the present, startling Mishima who looks at the sky as one looks at the past. When he commits seppuku, the three previous, fictional, parts of the novels, get revived in rapid succession, all culminating with the destruction as their ending, that had remained only evoked and let pending until we get to this point of finality, with, as it should be, Isao graphically tearing his flesh open on behalf of Mishima, precisely as he had wanted it. The ending of the movie is the ending of Runaway Horses.
Links
- Interview by Schrader on Mishima. There he says that Mishima was schizophrenic and sees seppuku as a male/female form of death (due to the penetration of the blade, "playing both parts").