Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

In his best and most audacious movie, Paul Schrader blows up the literary biopic to give us not only insights into radical nationalist writer Yukio Mishima’s life, but also into his work. Mishima himself refused to separate the two, eventually leading his own private army. By incorporating large swathes of his fiction, Schrader suggests the life was a work of art; the body itself as a piece of theatre. Cinematographer John Bailey and production designer Eiko Ishioka devise bold aesthetics for each section, which are nevertheless compounded in a mesmerizing Philip Glass score. Last year, Indiewire critics voted this the second greatest film of the 1980s (just behind Do the Right Thing).

One of the most gorgeous and sophisticated portraits of an artist ever put on film.

Michael Sragow, New Yorker

The most unconventional biopic I’ve ever seen, and one of the best.

Roger Ebert

There are two types of people in this world: those who think Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters — a kaleidoscopic character study of author-turned-nationalist Yukio Mishima — is the greatest biopic of all time, and those who haven’t seen it. Schrader’s film gloriously dismisses the genre’s foundations, paints a delirious portrait of its controversial Japanese figure, and directly transmits his flamboyant and flamboyantly contradictory psyche into its viewers via lucid dream. There’s nothing quite like Mishima, and there may never be again. Schrader has turned the man’s life into a line of poetry written in a splash of blood.

Gus Edgar-Chan, Indiewire

Media Partner