Tokyo, 1 9 7 0. The famous Japanese writer Yukio Mishima wakes up in his mansion, dresses up, assembles his private army of four and drives with a car to a military garrison... In flashbacks, Mishima's childhood is revealed: he lived with and served his sick grandmother who forbade him to see his mother. He stuttered and was weak, with a doctor deeming him unfit to serve in the army during World War II. After a Greek vacation, he decided to go to a gym and gain strength through muscles... Inserts from three of his novels are shown: a stuttering students sets fire to a Zen temple because he feels inferior confronted with beauty; in order to save his mother from a debt, a man accepts a contract with a sadomasochistic woman who "buys" him to cut his body with a knife. They both die; fanatic nationalists fail in an attempt to overthrow the government and the leader kills himself... In the present, Mishima and his men take a Japanese General hostage and address the garrison cadets. Mishima holds a speech in which he wants to restore the Emperor and is opposed to the influence of the West, but is ridiculed, and thus kills himself through disembowelment.
Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, a biobic of the controversial Japanese writer Yukio Mishima who later became a nationalist fanatic, "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" is one of the few hermetic movies that becomes actually less and less hermetic the longer one watches its storyline, since everything fits in the end. Writer and director Paul Schrader takes on a very creative, unique and unusual structure to tell this biopic: he presents the last day in Mishima's life, in color, while all the intermittent flashbacks of his childhood and past are presented in black and white—yet he also adds a totally unheard off idea of presenting three segments-adaptations from the author's three novels (!), also in color, to illustrate his life. This is as innovative as something on Godard's level—it would be as if someone would make a biopic about William Shakespeare and also add bonus scenes from "Romeo & Juliet", "Othello" and "Henry IV" to make a commentary on Shakespeare's love life, his jealousy and his betrayal. As far fetched as this may seem, it works meticulously in "Mishima" since the eponymous writer subconsciously revealed a lot of personal, hidden emotions in his novels. This parallel is done in a great match cut when a black and white scene of a kid Mishima stuttering cuts to a scene in color of a grown student stuttering from his future novel "The Temple of the Golden Pavillon" from 1 9 5 6.
In that excerpt from the novel, the stuttering student is lectured by another student with a limp foot, who gives him advice: "Face the fact you'll never be loved. It's the same for everybody. You can trick girls into loving your deformity." The student with the limp foot then falls in front of a girl and asks her to help him stand up, and she does out of pitty, and as they walk away, he turns around towards the stuttering student. This is there since it helps explain Mishima's later life: fearing he won't be loved because he stutters and is weak, he learns how to talk normally and goes to a gym to gain muscles and a strong body, as to not feel inferior or worthless compared to beauty. It seems as if Schrader is using clips from Mishima's novels as a psychoanalysis of the writer's persona. All the clips from the novels, including "Kyoko's House" and "Runaway Horses", are presented in a distinctive way, as highly artificial constructs to underline that feature: "The Temple of the Golden Pavillon" is set in a small studio set, with a miniature, 15ft tall temple, surrounded by walls with drawings of hills and bamboo trees. The sets in "Kyoko's House" is surrounded by a black background (in one such micro-set, the hero Osamu eats with his friends on a food stand that just rotates, while people walk around them, with darkness all around them); and in "Runaway Horses", red stones appear on a meadow. Philip Glass composes the great musical score, and some of it was reused again in "The Truman Show". In one scene, a pubescent Mishima reads a book and narrates ("Suddenly I came across a picture whose only purpose had been to lie in wait for centuries and ambush me... My hand unconsciously began a motion it had never been taught") as he spots a painting of a shirtless St. Sebastian with his arms tied up above him, and arrows in his body. As Mishima narrates: "The author is the ultimate voyeur. I didn’t just want to be the seer, I wanted to be seen." He made a short movie starring himself, because he wanted to be seen. And in that movie, he plays a liuetenant who commits hara-kiri. The motive of suicide or death is repeated several times in the movie, as a foreshadowing of the end. "Mishima" is a challenging, but also fascinating and hypnotic depiction of repressed passion, neurosis and complexities in Japan's society that almost finds its own movie language to tell its story.
Grade:+++
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