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16

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

7

Overwhelmingly beautiful to a point where I definitely owe it a revisit because before I could fully digest one line, we were on to another even more layered piece of writing. Maybe one of the best written films I've seen, one of my new favorite endings, and EASILY my new favorite score.

I am so late to this train but Paul Schrader is the freaking MAN.

Review by matt lynch ★★★★½ Liked

"A man's desire to become beautiful is also a desire for death."

Harmonizes actual events of Mishima's life, his nationalism, his persona as an artist, his fiction, and his own self-image, ultimately fully empathizing with his will to power and violent transcendence.

2

The Harmony of the Pen and the Sword, or "turn your life into a line of poetry written with a splash of blood."

At first glance, a biopic about a celebrated and controversial Japanese author might not seem like an obvious move for Paul Schrader but I think once you realize the kind of troubled, lonely, self-destructive outsider minds he’s attracted to and obsessed with (ones frequently looking to transcend their earthly punishments and express their ideas in writing/their rage in cathartic, cleansing, redemptive violence that they train and prepare for) it becomes quite clear what brought him to make a film about Yukio Mishima... And how lucky we are that the very stylized work of the man himself and…

8

Since moving to Japan, I've discovered that Yukio Mishima is still, to this day, a sore subject. In casual conversation about Japanese authors or in the classroom, the moment I mention Mishima an uncomfortable silence settles over the room. I've learnt not to mention my love of Spring Snow and The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. I get the tension. Mishima was a brilliant writer, but an unbelievably problematic person. Politically, he stands against everything I believe in, and he is a hero to Japan's infuriating nationalists whose vans that pump awful militaristic tunes have become the bane of my Sunday mornings. This complexity is exactly what makes Mishima such a fascinating subject to be deconstructed on…

7

i want to be brutally murdered while this film’s score plays in the background

5

"Creating something beautiful and becoming
beautiful oneself are indistinguishable."

"I come out on the stage determined to make
people weep. Instead, they burst out laughing."

"...I don't think they even heard me."

Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★½ Liked

google dot com has philip glass ever played coachella

11

“I wanted to explode, light the sky for an instant and disappear.”

Paul Schrader's magnum opus, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, recounts the life of a man who lived life on a precipice. Yukio Mishima was a prolific and influential writer whose avant-garde works often broke traditional styles of aesthetics with an explicit focus on sexuality, death, and notions of political radicalism. The film considers Mishima’s life in four distinct segments, leading to the last day of his life as he performs seppuku after a failed military coup.

In stark black and white, we see Mishima’s formative years as he is forced to confront his perceived inadequacies: his buried bisexuality and small physical frame. In florid colour paired with…

2

Most movies make me want to: watch other movies.

Mishima makes me want to: write a novel, dress exquisitely, train the body and mind for singular purposes, make love to beautiful women, form a milita with my best friends.

10

Watch a man pursue for the purest form of beauty, in words and images, in the human body and for the briefest moment, in love, before he switched to outright violence and destruction, then ceases to be a man and becomes the very embodiment of his ideas, it doesn't get more poetic than this.

Philosophy and aesthetic above all else (though it is difficult to determine whether Mishima is an artist embracing his philosophy, or the other way round), he proves this by wearing the japanese flag on his forehead -- the uppermost part of his body, where it is closest to his conscience. If his emperor is the sun, then the flag is the emperor's silhouette casted on pure white backdrop, and what is the sun but a symmetrical splash of blood, left behind by a man searching for a purpose, a meaning, a purity that is absolute, even in death.

3

they really made a film with a mishmash of stories from a guy called Mishima and didn't call it Mishimash