You won't be disappointed!

Don't Believe the Hype

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This movie has stayed with me for over 30'years due to the stunning visual imagery and impossibly perfect music score. One of the few movies that inspired me to read he author's books after watching. I wish I could watch this for the first time again!

This film, executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, and written and directed by Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver, American Gigolo), is one I never would have heard of, if not listed in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I hoped it would be good. Basically it is a fictionalised biopic, in four chapters of, about the life and work of celebrated Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (Ken Ogata). Set on 25th November 1970, the last day of his life, he is seen finishing a manuscript, then he puts on a uniform to meet with his most loyal followers from his private army. In flashbacks, we see Mishima's progression, from sickly young boy to one of Japan's most acclaimed writers of the post-war era. He is loathsome of materialism of modern Japan, and sets up his own private army, proclaiming to reinstate the emperor as the head of state. The biographical sections are interwoven with short dramatizations of three of his novels: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko's House, and Runaway Horses. The film culminates in Mishima and his followers taking hostage a General of the Japan Self-Defense Forces, he makes an address to the garrison's soldiers, asking them to join his struggle to reinstate the Emperor as the nation's sovereign, his speech is largely ignored and ridiculed. It ends with Mishima returning to the General's office and committing seppuku, a Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. Also starring Naoko Ôtani as Mother, Haruko Katô as Grandmother, Yuki Nagahara as Mishima, age 5, Masato Aizawa as Mishima, age 9-14, Gô Rijû as Mishima, age 18-19 and Junkichi Orimoto as General Mashita, and narrated by Roy Scheider. It is an interesting story, there are some memorable moments, both fictional and non-fictional, the use of scenery and colour is terrific, and the score composed by Philip Glass is great, including music I recognised that was used in the ending of The Truman Show, not a bad biographical drama. Worth watching!

I think that no film made can grade an IMDb 10 out of 10 - there is no such thing as perfection in art, the imperfection and striving for perfection is what makes art "art" and not just the words or pictures or sounds, but this movie comes very close. A challenging, totally immersive film experience. Beautifully constructed filmed and scored, it seems to reflect the essence of what was Mishima, seemingly conflicted, driven ideals were a launchpad for a celebrated and often controversial life. His art, political and personal beliefs are separate but all interconnected and essential aspects of the man, and the film manages to reflect this, combining all these elements within a beautifully presented and concise package. The Philip Glass music is very much love or hate, but if you happen to like Glass's style, this film can become the most incredible movie experience, as it provides the emotional drive for the arid narrative, the three intense highly colored selections from his short fictional stories and the final biographical scene. Still so underrated, but even after 25 years, it is one of the finest realisations of the art of cinema.

Overall, the DVD package is quite good, excepting Criterion's usual decision to go with white only subtitles for its black and white sections. And given Schrader's choice to use an English language voice-over in non-Japanese versions of the film (to avoid double subtitles in some shots), one wonders why the main body of action was not filmed in English, or at least dubbed? Schrader briefly tackles this in his audio commentary, and the main reason seems to have been financial.The same is not true for the actual film, which devolves into a stylized melodramatic mess that recalls much of Akira Kurosawa's late film, Dreams, as well as being filled with the most mind-numbing platitudes about art imaginable. Yet, equally bad is what is missing, above and beyond any portrait of Mishima's family life; such as his manifest Napoleon Complex. Mishima was only 5'1" tall and severely lacking in macho confidence, so much so that he insisted on only marrying a woman shorter than he was. Yet, any connection between these elements and those depicted is left for only the curious- and that likely will not be most people who watch this film. Thus, since the film fails on most artistic fronts, and does not generate any real further interest for its audience in its main subject matter, the very reason for the film is a puzzle, unless one feels Schrader is positing himself into a Mishima-like role. Not that it would matter, since Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters portrays its lead as a rather unsympathetic and idiotic character, albeit one with likely more talent than Schrader has.If only someone like an Ingmar Bergman, or even Michelangelo Antonioni, who started out as a documentarian, would have tackled this subject matter, the film would likely have been shorter, tighter, more purposive, and coherent, for if there was one thing that even his biggest critics could not hold against Mishima it was that he was driven and almost monomaniacal. Schrader is the opposite, desperately larding his film with almost everything that plays up his vision of the writer as madman and ignoring all that went into the artist as a man, something Schrader seems not to really get, which reaffirms my idea that his great screenplay for Taxi Driver was a fluke, that blindfolded, over the back toss of a dart that somehow hits the bull's-eye. Yet it was that lucky moment which doomed the rest of us to decades of profoundly dull and vapid films churned out on the strength of that one toss. Lucky Schrader. Unlucky us. As for Mishima? The real man's somewhere around, just as he must be in the film, right? Right?