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Entries tagged with 'Yukio'
Posted Jul. 3, 2008,
Mishima: Mesmerizing and Mysterious!
By Dennis Dermody
The mesmerizing, 1985 Paul Schrader film Mishima: A Life In Four Chaptera is finally out on DVD. The film is based on the life of Japan's celebrated novelist and playwright Yukio Mishima (played magnificently by Ken Ogata), who in 1970, with his trained personal army, took hostage of a government official and committed hari-kari. Schrader brilliantly blends Mishima's bizarre final day with aspects from his novels and gives an eloquent and artful rendering of his obsessions and passions. With a glorious score by Philip Glass and stunning cinematography by John Bailey, I forgot how much I loved this movie until I watched it again. Criterion once again did a great job with a host of extras including a BBC documentary The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima, which is extraordinary.
On a separate disc is Patriotism, Mishima's fascinating 1966 29-minute film which he directed and starred in as an officer who is ordered to kill his troops, but decides to take the high road by committing seppuku. He makes love to his wife and then they both commit suicide by the sword. It's weirdly a test run for his actual death and surprisingly gory as it is beautiful. I've only seen bits of this in documentaries so it was a thrill to finally witness the entire strange film.