You Know How the French Love Shadows
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)
directed by Paul Schrader
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Carnegie Library
I wanted to piece together something interesting to say about American Zoetrope, since this and The Black Stallion are the only films produced by the studio (before One from the Heart bankrupted it) not directed by Francis Ford Coppola or George Lucas. Like One from the Heart, Mishima is a soundstage movie. Eiko Ishioka, the production designer, went on to create those marvelous costumes for Dracula. And Lucas is a billionaire and Coppola makes wine; what is there really to talk about?
Lucas, more than Coppola, seemed indispensable in securing financing for Kagemusha. But Schrader's neon aesthetic is much closer to Coppola's than Lucas's. Were they all just in love with different aspects of Japan? In spite of the color, the sets, the score, Mishima is an average biopic: sympathetic but flat. My favorite moment came when the narrator thinks back to his time in the cockpit of an airplane, when he felt closest to the moment of understanding - to the balance of words and action - that he otherwise believed he must find in death.
There's something to be said for the way that writers born in the 1930s and 1940s used to think of flying as a romantic ideal. But those dreams, really, were of fighter pilots in the two World Wars - men in leather caps and scarves. When jets appeared, I suppose they embodied the limits of the mental pursuit made physical, but there was no place to go from there, unless it was outer space, a genre that men like Mishima shied from. People my age have spent our lives being less and less impressed by planes, which at this point are simply blunt exercises in physics.
Good thing a rewatch of Porco Rosso is about due.
directed by Paul Schrader
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Carnegie Library
I wanted to piece together something interesting to say about American Zoetrope, since this and The Black Stallion are the only films produced by the studio (before One from the Heart bankrupted it) not directed by Francis Ford Coppola or George Lucas. Like One from the Heart, Mishima is a soundstage movie. Eiko Ishioka, the production designer, went on to create those marvelous costumes for Dracula. And Lucas is a billionaire and Coppola makes wine; what is there really to talk about?
Lucas, more than Coppola, seemed indispensable in securing financing for Kagemusha. But Schrader's neon aesthetic is much closer to Coppola's than Lucas's. Were they all just in love with different aspects of Japan? In spite of the color, the sets, the score, Mishima is an average biopic: sympathetic but flat. My favorite moment came when the narrator thinks back to his time in the cockpit of an airplane, when he felt closest to the moment of understanding - to the balance of words and action - that he otherwise believed he must find in death.
There's something to be said for the way that writers born in the 1930s and 1940s used to think of flying as a romantic ideal. But those dreams, really, were of fighter pilots in the two World Wars - men in leather caps and scarves. When jets appeared, I suppose they embodied the limits of the mental pursuit made physical, but there was no place to go from there, unless it was outer space, a genre that men like Mishima shied from. People my age have spent our lives being less and less impressed by planes, which at this point are simply blunt exercises in physics.
Good thing a rewatch of Porco Rosso is about due.
posted by NPK at 12:45 AM
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