Just saw Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters at the Rafael. Part of the Mill Valley Film Festival, of course.
I’ve never seen it before, and this is a new “Enhansed” version created for Criterion DVD release. One scene restored (I don’t know which) and some digital trickery added. Well, it was co-produced by George Lucas, so I guess that’s inevitable.
If it’s not a great film, it’s close. I’m tempted to call it several great short films that kind of hang together. By the end it works as a piece. A sort of impressionistic biopic of novelist and fascist hero Yukio Mishima, it cuts back and forth between the last day of his life (in color), flashbacks to his past (black and white), and dramitizations of three of his novels (hyper-color on stylized sets). The impression is of a brilliant lunatic, motivated by fears of aging, fantasies of a heroic death, and unease over his own homosexuality.
The festival screened this gorgeous film in an equally gorgeous print, projected for the very first time. If I understood Schrader’s introduction, this print was made directly off of the new digital intermediary, without the usual, image-compromising intermediate positive and negative.
Schrader and producer Tom Luddy answered questions after the film. They talked about why Mishima, a film in Japanese, with a Japanese star and cast, shot entirely in Japan, has never been shown in that country. He described Mishima as a controversal figure in Japan, and that the Japanese culture prefers to shy away from controversy. The country’s rightwing, which pretty much worships the novelist, didn’t like the idea of a westerner making this movie.
“I don’t know how political [Mishimah] really was,” said Schrader in answer to another question. Then he quoted Mishimah himself saying he joined the Right because the Left was already full.
Bayflicks 