A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (Paul Schrader, 1985)

Ken Ogata in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
November 25, 1970, and flashbacks:
Yukio Mishima: Ken Ogata
Masakatsu Morita: Masayuki Shionoya
Gen. Mashita: Junkichi Orimoto
Mother: Naoko Otani
Grandmother: Haruko Kato
Mishima, age 18-19: Go Riju
Mishima, age 9-14: Masato Aizawa

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion:
Mizoguchi: Yasosuke Bando
Kashiwagi: Koichi Sato
Mariko: Hisako Manda
Monk: Chishu Ryu

Kyoko's House: 
Osamu: Kenji Sawada
Kiyomi: Reisen Lee
Mitsuko: Setsuko Karasuma
Osamu's Mother: Sachiko Hidari

Runaway Horses: 
Isao: Toshiyuki Nagashima
Lt. Hori: Hiroshi Katsuno
Kurahara: Jun Negami
Izutsu: Hiroki Ida
Interrogator: Ryo Ikebe

Director: Paul Schrader
Screenplay: Paul Schrader, Leonard Schrader, Chieko Schrader
Based on novels by Yuko Mishima
Cinematography: John Bailey
Production design: Eiko Ishioka
Film editing: Michael Chandler, Tomoyo Oshima
Music: Philip Glass

In the midst of watching Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, I found myself having feelings of déjà vu -- specifically, during the chapter titled "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion," a dramatization of one of Yukio Mishima's novels. Then it came to me: It was the novel on which Kon Ichikawa's film Conflagration (1958) was based. I had faulted Ichikawa's film for the confusions caused by a "truncated" adaptation of Mishima's novel and for its "sometimes plodding narrative," while praising the intensity of Tatsuya Nakadai as the crippled young acolyte. Seeing the condensed version of the Mishima novel in Schrader's film makes me want to go back to watch Conflagration again, or really to read the novel along with the others integrated into Schrader's film about Mishima's troubled but intensely creative life. The point of the Schrader film is that Mishima's art was inextricable from his life, from his coddled and repressed childhood through his sexual excesses and finally his disastrous paramilitary adventure and suicide. Ken Ogata doesn't look much like Mishima, but as his work in such films as The Demon (Yoshitaro Nomura, 1978) and Vengeance Is Mine (Shohei Imamura, 1979) shows, Ogata has the kind of raw commitment to acting that makes him perfect for the role of the charismatic and self-destructive artist. Schrader's Mishima is one of a kind, a fascinating blend of superb cinematography, evocative art direction, and hypnotic music, along with a disturbing story. In some ways, I prefer Schrader's film to the more celebrated ones made by Martin Scorsese from Schrader's screenplays, namely Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980).
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