Yet, even with those seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Schrader was, in fact, the perfect person--at least, the perfect Westerner--to direct a film about Mishima. He had several strong connections to Japanese culture: his brother, Leonard Schrader, with whom he cowrote the script, was living in Japan at the time of Mishima’s suicide; his first produced screenplay was The Yakuza (1974), an action film about Japanese gangsters; and his first mark on the cinematic world was his book Transcendental Style in Film, a major portion of which focused on the films of Yasujiro Ozu, “the most Japanese of Japanese directors.” More importantly, though, Schrader’s own thematic interests paralleled Mishima’s life in numerous ways, particularly his fascination with single-minded protagonists who are hellbent on some form of self-destruction as transcendence, however perverse (think of Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver’s suicidal avenging angel, or Jake La Motta, the troubled pugilist in Raging Bull). As Schrader said in an interview, “Mishima was the sort of character I’d like to have created if he hadn’t already existed.”

In Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Schrader doesn’t so much recreate the external life of Yukio Mishima as he explores the artist’s inner world. In this regard, Mishima is a unique and masterful film biography that avoids all the conventional cinematic clichés and instead focuses on the intersections between the man’s lived experiences and his art. No film, no matter how long, can fully encompass someone’s life, which is why so many biopics that attempt to do just that feel contrived and formula-bound. Schrader captures the essence of Mishima without resorting to such tactics by making the film about what was most important to the man: his art.

Scored with operatic music by Philip Glass, Mishima is organized around passages from several of the writer’s key novels, which are performed in a highly stylized, purposefully theatrical manner. The production design by Eiko Ishioka (who would later design Bram Stoker’s Dracula for Francis Ford Coppola and both of Tarsem Singh’s films) is extraordinary in both aesthetic beauty (the colors are so intense that many viewers assume they are the result of filters or special film stock) and abstract expressiveness. Each of these sequences, while derived from one of Mishima’s fictional works, has autobiographical undertones, thus they open a window into both the author’s life and how he used it in his art. Moreso than most artists, Mishima saw himself--not just his work, but his physical existence--as part of his artistic endeavor, and we can see in his protagonists his own trajectory from shy, timid, and weak to powerful, hungry, and determined.

The stylized fictional passages are intercut into the film’s controlling framework, which is the last of day of Mishima’s life in which he and several cadets from his personal army took control of the army headquarters in Tokyo, attempted to foment an uprising by the soldiers as part of his larger aim to return Japan to its traditional feudal past, and, failing that, committed ritualistic suicide (seppuku) as his final statement in life. These scenes are shot with a raw, handheld quality that brings us directly into the action; in stark contrast to the metaphorical nature of the fictional sequences, these scenes are decidedly present tense, and in staggering them throughout the film, Schrader gives the otherwise collage-like nature of the narrative a fully throttled directionality and suspense, even if you know where it all ends.

Throughout the film Schrader also gives us black-and-white flashbacks to various points in Mishima’s life--the “defining moments,” you might say--that helped shape his identity and worldview. These include his early childhood, which were spent with a sick, aristocratic grandmother (Haruko Kato) who constantly referred to him as “fragile” and refused to let him go outside; his army physical exam in which he faked being sick to avoid the service in World War II that, deep inside, he always wanted; and his eventual obsession with feudalism and the samurai code, which would come to define his national outlook and his rejection of Western capitalist values in favor of symbolic emperor worship. However, even as Mishima delved deep into a reactively conservation nationalism, he still craved appreciation in the West, which is just one of his many contradictions.

As portrayed by Ken Ogata, Mishima is many things at once--sympathetic, humane, determined, charismatic, isolated, brilliant, disturbed--but always larger than life. What so many biopics try to do is distill complication and contradiction into something neat, understandable, and reassuring, which is why they have such conventional narrative arcs and are consistently popular with audiences. Schrader rejects that approach outright and embraces Mishima’s complications (his refusal to ignore Mishima’s homosexuality, which is directly referenced in one brief scene in a gay bar, ultimately cost Schrader the cooperation of Mishima’s widow). Thus, Mishima is an elaborate, thought-provoking, and constantly challenging portrait that ultimately offers more questions than answers, which is why it is one of the few biopics that can be said to be genuinely honest about its subject.

Copyright ©2008 James Kendrick

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