TV Obsessive
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Hal: Since the subgenre is so routinely bogged down in familiarity and stale reverence, it’s no surprise that the best, most effective and satisfying biographical films are so often the least conventional, the ones most willing to take risks and attempting to evoke a conception of the spirit of the individual rather than merely dramatically re-enact their life and times.
Two of my favourite biopics in their vein are The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, each a masterpiece in its own right, approaching, through their portraits of a specific, singular life, an exploration of the meaning of any life. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is a similar expression of this kind of idea, melding the life and works of noted author Yukio Mishima into a fragmentary whole, exploring the obsessions and ideas that possessed him throughout his life.
Despite the cultural barrier, many of these are the same themes that director Paul Schrader has returned to throughout his filmography: the social responsibility of the individual, masochism, spiritual ecstasy, eroticism, thanatophilia, and above all, Mishima’s doomed desire to reconcile artistic expression and direct action, seeking a kind of explosive, orgasmic moment of presentness.
The film downplays some elements of Mishima’s life in pursuit of this masculine sublime—almost all the details which would preoccupy a traditional biopic as matter of course, are brushed aside.
Instead, three of the four chapters of the title are adaptations of noted works, playing out on stylised theatrical sets. From these stories, the film draws parallels to his own life: his masochistic obsessions with national unity, with body sculpting, and with militarised insurrection, attempting to build a portrait of Mishima from the way he expressed himself through his own art.
The first, ‘The Temple of the Golden Pavilion’, focuses on a stuttering young man’s first exploration of sex, sublimated onto the local temple. The second, ‘Kyoko’s House’, follows a vain young actor’s sadomasochistic relationship with a money lender, and the third the leader of a nationalist militia who attempts to assassinate members of the wealthy elite. Each of these chapters is interleaved with flashbacks though, to Mishima’s own life and habits, building to the single day in 1970 which comprises both the frame narrative and final chapter. It’s an undeniably novel, striking and highly motivated approach to biography, if not perhaps an entirely successful one.
Mishima often emerges as an absurdly self-important and comically arrogant figure—a true aesthete—who cloaks his elusive and illogical psychosexual urges in supposedly political motivations. In portraying him this way, Paul Schrader has produced a film every bit as mannered and obtuse as his subject. Perhaps a native Japanese filmmaker would have been better able to reconcile the film’s myriad cultural influences, or perhaps that very incoherence is the point. There are some knowing moments of beautiful clarity, but they seldom vibrate with the same urgency or potency sought after by both the film and its subject.
