Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985)

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is one of those rare biographical films that doesn’t just tell you who its subject was—it makes you feel the heat of his ideas, the seduction of his aesthetics, and the terrible momentum of his convictions. Paul Schrader stages Mishima’s life as a kind of cinematic symphony, braiding the tension of his final day with vivid, stylized dramatizations of his fiction, all rendered in Eiko Ishioka’s breathtaking theatrical design and driven by Philip Glass’s propulsive, thunder-in-the-blood score. Ken Ogata’s performance is magnetic without begging for sympathy, capturing a man split between discipline and desire, art and action, public myth and private need. It’s intense, cerebral, and formally daring—less a cozy drama than an electrifying gallery of images and ideas—so if you want straightforward realism it may feel remote, but if you’re open to cinema as obsession made visible, it’s unforgettable.

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is clearly aiming for an art-film portrait rather than a cradle-to-grave biopic, using stylized recreations of Mishima’s novels to get at his obsessions with beauty, violence, and ideology. The problem is the structure can feel like homework if you’re not already intrigued by Mishima: it jumps between timelines and theatrical set pieces, and the exposition is dense enough that you may admire it more than you actually feel it. The pacing is deliberate and sometimes chilly, and the later chapters don’t always land with the same punch as the earlier ones, which can make the whole thing feel more like a concept than a story. If you want a straightforward, emotionally accessible drama, this probably isn’t it—but if you’re up for a visually rigorous, cerebral film with a committed lead performance and a bold formal approach, it can be a fascinating watch.