Overall, the DVD package is quite good, excepting Criterion's usual decision to go with white only subtitles for its black and white sections. And given Schrader's choice to use an English language voice-over in non-Japanese versions of the film (to avoid double subtitles in some shots), one wonders why the main body of action was not filmed in English, or at least dubbed? Schrader briefly tackles this in his audio commentary, and the main reason seems to have been financial.
The same is not true for the actual film, which devolves into a stylized melodramatic mess that recalls much of Akira Kurosawa's late film, Dreams, as well as being filled with the most mind-numbing platitudes about art imaginable. Yet, equally bad is what is missing, above and beyond any portrait of Mishima's family life; such as his manifest Napoleon Complex. Mishima was only 5'1" tall and severely lacking in macho confidence, so much so that he insisted on only marrying a woman shorter than he was. Yet, any connection between these elements and those depicted is left for only the curious- and that likely will not be most people who watch this film. Thus, since the film fails on most artistic fronts, and does not generate any real further interest for its audience in its main subject matter, the very reason for the film is a puzzle, unless one feels Schrader is positing himself into a Mishima-like role. Not that it would matter, since Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters portrays its lead as a rather unsympathetic and idiotic character, albeit one with likely more talent than Schrader has.
If only someone like an Ingmar Bergman, or even Michelangelo Antonioni, who started out as a documentarian, would have tackled this subject matter, the film would likely have been shorter, tighter, more purposive, and coherent, for if there was one thing that even his biggest critics could not hold against Mishima it was that he was driven and almost monomaniacal. Schrader is the opposite, desperately larding his film with almost everything that plays up his vision of the writer as madman and ignoring all that went into the artist as a man, something Schrader seems not to really get, which reaffirms my idea that his great screenplay for Taxi Driver was a fluke, that blindfolded, over the back toss of a dart that somehow hits the bull's-eye. Yet it was that lucky moment which doomed the rest of us to decades of profoundly dull and vapid films churned out on the strength of that one toss. Lucky Schrader. Unlucky us. As for Mishima? The real man's somewhere around, just as he must be in the film, right? Right?
The same is not true for the actual film, which devolves into a stylized melodramatic mess that recalls much of Akira Kurosawa's late film, Dreams, as well as being filled with the most mind-numbing platitudes about art imaginable. Yet, equally bad is what is missing, above and beyond any portrait of Mishima's family life; such as his manifest Napoleon Complex. Mishima was only 5'1" tall and severely lacking in macho confidence, so much so that he insisted on only marrying a woman shorter than he was. Yet, any connection between these elements and those depicted is left for only the curious- and that likely will not be most people who watch this film. Thus, since the film fails on most artistic fronts, and does not generate any real further interest for its audience in its main subject matter, the very reason for the film is a puzzle, unless one feels Schrader is positing himself into a Mishima-like role. Not that it would matter, since Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters portrays its lead as a rather unsympathetic and idiotic character, albeit one with likely more talent than Schrader has.
If only someone like an Ingmar Bergman, or even Michelangelo Antonioni, who started out as a documentarian, would have tackled this subject matter, the film would likely have been shorter, tighter, more purposive, and coherent, for if there was one thing that even his biggest critics could not hold against Mishima it was that he was driven and almost monomaniacal. Schrader is the opposite, desperately larding his film with almost everything that plays up his vision of the writer as madman and ignoring all that went into the artist as a man, something Schrader seems not to really get, which reaffirms my idea that his great screenplay for Taxi Driver was a fluke, that blindfolded, over the back toss of a dart that somehow hits the bull's-eye. Yet it was that lucky moment which doomed the rest of us to decades of profoundly dull and vapid films churned out on the strength of that one toss. Lucky Schrader. Unlucky us. As for Mishima? The real man's somewhere around, just as he must be in the film, right? Right?