“Love when you’re ready, not when you’re lonely.”
— Unknown
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“And, when it burns, / Let it burn.”
— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from “Casa Guidi Windows,” c. 1851 (edited)
Life on the Cosmic Shore.
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More than a few foreign filmmaker have tried relocating to Hollywood, but it’s less often the case that an acclaimed Hollywood artist takes their talents overseas. Paul Schrader, at the height of his post-Taxi Driver, post-Raging Bull success, proved a notable example. In the mid-1980s, he took an opportunity to capitalize on his longstanding fascination with Japan by directing an entire film with an all-Japanese cast and script, his sister-in-law Chieko Schrader serving as linguistic and artistic interpreter. Its subject: Yukio Mishima, a controversial figure whose death so deeply shocked Japan that the film, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, remains banned there. Now — in the U.S. at least — the Criterion Collection is giving the film Schrader considers his finest directorial achievement a new 4K transfer and Blu-ray release.
Mishima, portrayed by Ken Ogata, was one of Japan’s most internationally acclaimed authors, and likely the country’s most infamous suicide. In 1970, after a successful career in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, theater, and film that spanned over two decades, he and four young disciples of his right-wing militant organization staged a failed coup at the military Camp Ichigaya, the man then committing seppuku — ritual suicide by blade — under the dumbstruck eyes of the army and media. With no demands met and no casualties inflicted except himself and his closest confidant, Mishima’s lethal demonstration was less terrorism than performance art — the culminating expression, argues A Life in Four Chapters, of personal philosophies a whole lifetime in the making.