September 13, 2005
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Originally posted May 5, 2004.
Today I had to do some pretty tedious stuff, and so I ran a film on the laptop DVD player as I worked. As a result, you get what will probably end up being a pretty unusual 3rd review in 24 hours.
The writer Yukio Mishima was one of the most complex, enigmatic (OK, OK: incredibly odd) figures to emerge in post-WWII Japanese literature. His spectacular death in 1970 (he commmitted ritual suicide after seizing, with the assistance of soldiers from his private army, a Japanese Army barracks, in the process taking a General hostage, in a failed attempt to instigate a military coup to restore the Emperor to power in order to restore samurai values to an increasingly spiritually vapid consumer society-and if you had to read that several times to take it all in, so did the Japanese at the time) is a key moment in the pop history of modern Japan. In some sense, one could speculate that Mishima was eventually torn apart by the tensions created by the inner battle between the parts of his soul that belonged to sensei and k (a la Soseki's Kokoro). He certainly believed that his life was a work of art (and got many others to buy into that notion), and it isn't clear that the real goal of his final mission was the ostensible objective.
"Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters" chronicles Mishima's life in a novel fashion (one that merits your attention even if you are not particularly interested in Mishima himself). It involves the effective intermingling of three types of scenes: those drawn from Mishima's final day (in standard color); his memories of various crucial phases of his life (in black and white); enactments of key segments of some of his novels to illustrate the crucial tensions of that particular phase of his life (shot in brilliant color, with set designs involving beautiful and somehow stark (maybe minimalist would be better way of putting it?) aesthetic schemes). An unforgettable movie, both for its artistic achievement as well as its effective look into the soul of a tortured modern man. The soundtrack by Phillip Glass is very nice and really helps to set mood.
Posted by dag at September 13, 2005 11:16 AM