Film: Mishima, a forgotten film masterpiece from the 1980s
If you were a talented American director, the Hollywood of the 1980's must have felt adrift. The gritty realism that marked 1970's classics like Taxi Driver, Deliverance, Raging Bull, and Midnight Cowboy fell prey to more escapist fare that elided with the feel-good Reagan era--epics like Gandhi, sci fi like Raiders of the Lost Ark, soap operas like Ordinary People and Terms of Endearment. All of these were well crafted, but did not exactly challenge one's world view. In 1985 Paul Schrader directed Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters. Based on a the notorious life and 1970 suicide of the famed Japanese author Yukio Mishima, it won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but was never released in Japan. The film was completely unknown to me, and I think it is a fascinating, engaging, neglected masterpiece, well worth seeing on DVD or here on YouTube (if you play it on the computer, try to project on a bigger screen...the cinematography deserves it).
Schrader was well known for his screenplays for the brilliant Martin Scorsese films Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and had directed four others, only one (the creepy American Gigolo with the sultry Richard Gere making straight male filmgoers uncomfortable with his sexuality) of which created much stir. Of his eventual 18 films (e.g. Affliction, The Last Temptation of Christ), Mishima is his masterpiece, unique in many ways.
Subject
While posthumously lauding Mishima as their best author, the Japanese preferred to forget the unruly details of his life. He was a conservatively married closeted gay man, a short, frail pedant who later buffed up with obsessive weight training because dying as a wimp offended his artistic sensibilities, and a passionate imperialist who worshiped kamikaze culture and felt that Japan had failed the emperor in World War 2. Typical of his inconsistency, he excitedly tried to volunteer for WW2 military service, then faked tubercular illness so he did not have to go. He likely would have gotten a Nobel Prize for literature (he deferentially agreed to nominate a senior colleague instead) but finally achieved transient international fame when he stormed the Japan Defense Forces headquarters with his (homoerotic) corps of trained young men, held the commanding general hostage, was shouted down by the massed troops as he tried to get them to enforce Japan's traditional values and cult of emperor, then retreated into the general's office to commit partially-botched ritual suicide (seppuku) to die as a true samurai. Even better, he had apparently been planning this denouement for years, wanting an appropriately dramatic death, probably less about politics than extravagant theater. All these sordid details embarrassed the Japanese greatly, as they were then trying to show the world their new Western, economically robust incarnation. Mishima was selectively forgotten: his family and society continued to venerate his many books while forgetting his life and blocking attempts at written or filmed biography. When, 14 years after his death, American director Schrader proposed a the first movie about him, he met resistance from the family, the Japanese film industry, and the government, all who wanted to suppress such details as his homosexuality and emperor-worship, or at least tell the story in a sanitized "non-foreign" way. So the schizoid Mishima is a nice avatar for the schizoid Japanese post-war history and culture.
Film structure and style
Schrader uses three different cinematography color schemes in the movie. The suicide is filmed in grainy half color with a jittery hand held cameras, like a documentary. The flashbacks to his real life are in black and white in a slowly panning camera style evoking older Japanese classical directors like Ozu or Mizoguchi. Finally, extended filmed excerpts from his autobiographical novels that reflect on his personality and character are staged as 1930's stylized theater pieces with vivid, Wizard of Oz brilliant colors, a different color palette for each novel. All this is melded so cleverly that it does not seem jumpy or distracting. For example, at one point the body-obsessed Mishima is pushing weights, eyeing other men in a (black and white) weight room. He then grabs a towel and goes through a door into the shower. But as the film cuts to the door opening on the shower interior, we are now suddenly in brilliant purple-red shower with a fantasy landscape of naked men all around, a scene from one of his novels. See it here. The mix of all this adds a wonderful mix of gritty reality, immediacy, and fantasy. Of note is that the score was composed by Philip Glass in one of his first efforts in film, and the pulsing minimalism adds a great agitated touch to the neurosis on display.
Screenplay
The film is in Japanese with English subtitles, a choice apparently made necessary by the lack of English-speaking Japanese actors in the 1980's. Various well known Japanese pop and film stars agreed to do the film for Schrader, despite the threat of lawsuits by Mishima's widow. The whole thing was quite a trial to finance and film. The resultant Mishima is an American film made in Japanese with Japanese stars but only released in the west-- lawsuits and Japanese cultural reticence have precluded any Japanese release to this day. Unlike the deliberate speech in classic Japanese films, the dialogue is often rapid and American-styled, matching Mishima's self conception as a cosmopolitan man of the world. He built a western neo-Renaissance home in Tokyo with Italianate nude male sculptures scattered about, a set reproduced in the film. Yet his novels and his politics, however real they were, resided in the conservative world of the Japanese emperors and conservative tradition. The screenplay manages to capture all these contradictions convincingly.
All in all, Mishima warrants our attention as an innovative classic film from the otherwise sappy 1980's. The subject is about as fascinating as it gets, and the film admirably resists the temptation common to most film biographies to explain or psychoanalyze, since he is one of those rare personalities who may resist any form of accurate analysis, showing a different face to different friends and relatives. The miracle of this film is that Paul Schrader takes so many risks with style, language, homoerotic symbolism (St. Sebastian with the arrows appears several times), nonlinear plot, and tone, yet holds the whole thing together to make an entertaining movie. I cannot think of anything in film where such innovation seems to actually forward the movie, not seem gimmicky as it does with the French New Wavers like Godard. Quite a feat. See it!
Schrader was well known for his screenplays for the brilliant Martin Scorsese films Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and had directed four others, only one (the creepy American Gigolo with the sultry Richard Gere making straight male filmgoers uncomfortable with his sexuality) of which created much stir. Of his eventual 18 films (e.g. Affliction, The Last Temptation of Christ), Mishima is his masterpiece, unique in many ways.
Subject
While posthumously lauding Mishima as their best author, the Japanese preferred to forget the unruly details of his life. He was a conservatively married closeted gay man, a short, frail pedant who later buffed up with obsessive weight training because dying as a wimp offended his artistic sensibilities, and a passionate imperialist who worshiped kamikaze culture and felt that Japan had failed the emperor in World War 2. Typical of his inconsistency, he excitedly tried to volunteer for WW2 military service, then faked tubercular illness so he did not have to go. He likely would have gotten a Nobel Prize for literature (he deferentially agreed to nominate a senior colleague instead) but finally achieved transient international fame when he stormed the Japan Defense Forces headquarters with his (homoerotic) corps of trained young men, held the commanding general hostage, was shouted down by the massed troops as he tried to get them to enforce Japan's traditional values and cult of emperor, then retreated into the general's office to commit partially-botched ritual suicide (seppuku) to die as a true samurai. Even better, he had apparently been planning this denouement for years, wanting an appropriately dramatic death, probably less about politics than extravagant theater. All these sordid details embarrassed the Japanese greatly, as they were then trying to show the world their new Western, economically robust incarnation. Mishima was selectively forgotten: his family and society continued to venerate his many books while forgetting his life and blocking attempts at written or filmed biography. When, 14 years after his death, American director Schrader proposed a the first movie about him, he met resistance from the family, the Japanese film industry, and the government, all who wanted to suppress such details as his homosexuality and emperor-worship, or at least tell the story in a sanitized "non-foreign" way. So the schizoid Mishima is a nice avatar for the schizoid Japanese post-war history and culture.
Film structure and style
Schrader uses three different cinematography color schemes in the movie. The suicide is filmed in grainy half color with a jittery hand held cameras, like a documentary. The flashbacks to his real life are in black and white in a slowly panning camera style evoking older Japanese classical directors like Ozu or Mizoguchi. Finally, extended filmed excerpts from his autobiographical novels that reflect on his personality and character are staged as 1930's stylized theater pieces with vivid, Wizard of Oz brilliant colors, a different color palette for each novel. All this is melded so cleverly that it does not seem jumpy or distracting. For example, at one point the body-obsessed Mishima is pushing weights, eyeing other men in a (black and white) weight room. He then grabs a towel and goes through a door into the shower. But as the film cuts to the door opening on the shower interior, we are now suddenly in brilliant purple-red shower with a fantasy landscape of naked men all around, a scene from one of his novels. See it here. The mix of all this adds a wonderful mix of gritty reality, immediacy, and fantasy. Of note is that the score was composed by Philip Glass in one of his first efforts in film, and the pulsing minimalism adds a great agitated touch to the neurosis on display.
Screenplay
The film is in Japanese with English subtitles, a choice apparently made necessary by the lack of English-speaking Japanese actors in the 1980's. Various well known Japanese pop and film stars agreed to do the film for Schrader, despite the threat of lawsuits by Mishima's widow. The whole thing was quite a trial to finance and film. The resultant Mishima is an American film made in Japanese with Japanese stars but only released in the west-- lawsuits and Japanese cultural reticence have precluded any Japanese release to this day. Unlike the deliberate speech in classic Japanese films, the dialogue is often rapid and American-styled, matching Mishima's self conception as a cosmopolitan man of the world. He built a western neo-Renaissance home in Tokyo with Italianate nude male sculptures scattered about, a set reproduced in the film. Yet his novels and his politics, however real they were, resided in the conservative world of the Japanese emperors and conservative tradition. The screenplay manages to capture all these contradictions convincingly.
All in all, Mishima warrants our attention as an innovative classic film from the otherwise sappy 1980's. The subject is about as fascinating as it gets, and the film admirably resists the temptation common to most film biographies to explain or psychoanalyze, since he is one of those rare personalities who may resist any form of accurate analysis, showing a different face to different friends and relatives. The miracle of this film is that Paul Schrader takes so many risks with style, language, homoerotic symbolism (St. Sebastian with the arrows appears several times), nonlinear plot, and tone, yet holds the whole thing together to make an entertaining movie. I cannot think of anything in film where such innovation seems to actually forward the movie, not seem gimmicky as it does with the French New Wavers like Godard. Quite a feat. See it!
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