Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) is a biographical drama you can watch online on iFILM. Paul Schrader — the writer behind Taxi Driver and Raging Bull — directed and co-wrote this formally daring portrait of Yukio Mishima, the Japanese novelist who on the morning of November 25, 1970, put on a military uniform, drove to a Tokyo Self-Defense Forces base, and tried to incite a coup.

The film runs on three tracks simultaneously. One follows that final morning in real time. Another draws from Mishima's own memories — childhood, wartime adolescence, the slow construction of a public persona. The third stages dramatizations of three of his novels: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko's House, and Runaway Horses — each rendered in a distinct visual register, shot by cinematographer John Bailey with an almost theatrical precision. Philip Glass composed the score, and it's inseparable from how the film feels.

Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize four times. He founded his own private militia. He was a body-builder, a film actor, and one of the most widely translated Japanese writers of the twentieth century. Schrader doesn't explain him — he lets the novels explain him. The film took the Jury Prize for Artistic Contribution at Cannes in 1985. One of the stranger, more rewarding biographical films ever made. Stream Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) online on iFILM.