Rating: 
Summary: Why Region 1 only?
Review: This film is a masterpiece of cinema and by far my favourite film. I have video copies of the English version and the Japanese version (Japanese narration with English subtitles), and would love to be able to buy it on DVD. But this DVD is Region 1 and unplayable in the UK where I live. This does seem shortsighted. The film was released years ago and doesn't need Regional protection, and it is extremely unlikely that anyone will produce a UK version of the DVD. My 5 star rating is for the cinematic content, not the DVD.
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Summary: mishima a film review in four words
Review: this film is art.
Rating:
Summary: stunning visuals, my favorite movie of all time
Review: This is far and away my favorite movie of all time, and I highly recommend it for anyone who's passionate about richly textured movies. The sound track (by Philip Glass) is one of his best works (that's how I discovered the movie in fact) and the art direction is extremely beautiful. The director does a great job of mixing together the multiple strands of Mishima's life (his life's history, his decision to kill himself, and his art) and shows how they weave in and out with one another. Mishima himself was not a great man - a bit of a clown even - but this movie seeks out the parts of his life that are relevant to all of us and puts them together perfectly. I consider this movie "must see" for any theatrical set designer or movie cinematographer.
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Summary: Outstanding
Review: This is one of, if not the cleverest film that I've ever seen. Despite highly selective use of them, it remains substantially faithful to the four books from which it tells his story. (The fourth is the autobiographical Sun and Steel, from which the voiceovers are drawn). The sets are the epitome of elegance and economy; the striking imagery in Runaway Horses is my personal favorite. It definitely repays familiarity with Mishima's work and politics; although it's a magnificent achievement for the cinematography alone, there's a lot in it that's not readily accessible unless you already know a certain amount about him. This being said, for sheer ingenuity I struggle to think of any film that matches this.
Rating: 
Summary: a rich, aesthetically pleasing mess.
Review: Unlike many of the films he has written for other directors, I have yet to see a film directed by Schrader that entirely works. He's talented for sure, but there are definite limits to that talent. And, unlike most directors, its difficult to locate where the boundaries of those limitations begin and end. ("Light Sleeper" is the only flat-out lousy Schrader-directed film I've seen - it's badness accentuated by the lifting of whole passages from "Taxi Driver.") Usually you know there's a lot wrong, but there's something good there too that keeps you watching."Mishima" doesn't work as biography and it doesn't work as literary adaptation, either. Seeing this film won't give anyone much of a sense of the man's character or the character of his work. It's not particularly illuminating - but it IS luminous. The visual, aural and narrative structure of this film is magnificent. Its a sort of cinematic poem that uses Mishima's life and art as it's inspiration, rather than the poetic representation of his life and art that it tries to be. It's far from perfect - but when a movie looks and sounds this good and is as cleverly designed, one cares little about it's (considerable) shortcomings. It's always bothered me that Ogata isn't a better physical match for Mishima - given the author's obsession with (and the film's limitation to) surface appearances. Schrader says in the commentary that he couldn't find a more visually suitable actor who could also carry off the performance. Given the end result, I can't believe that he searched very hard. It's not Ogata's fault. He's a fine actor. We don't get the feeling we do when Anthony Hopkins seems to be channeling Nixon, or even the irritating awareness that Woody Harrelson's Larry Flynt is well studied, but false. We just get that Ogata's Mishima is miscast. The crazed, narcissistic arrogance that infused much of his later writings, and those weird beefcake photos that are recreated here, doesn't come across. Nor does the sense of deep obsession, the fetishism or the occasional lacerating insight that could rip through the page. And you never get the creeped-out ticking grenade feeling that you do when Mishima writes on and on about "purity." When we see Ogata's Mishima rehearsing seppuku in his little movie it doesn't have any weight. Certainly not the weight of his actual romance and gore-soaked performance, caught on film (now THERE would have been an extra!), or when he rehearsed it over and over again on paper. You never get a real sense of what the act (at least before the fact) meant to him emotionally and spiritually - which comes through loud and clear elsewhere. But the sets and Glass' music that matches up perfectly with Schrader's nifty structure can actually make you forgive all that and more. (The acting in the "Golden Pavilion" scenes is really atrocious - but one is easily distracted from it.) Schrader's commentary is interesting and helpful - but one is advised to take some of his cultural observations with a big grain of salt. ("Japan is a land of no contracts, but a great deal of honor," or some such quaintness. Then he goes on to tell a story that probably shouldn't be repeated whether it's true or not.) I wasn't at all in love with the original narration in the first place, so the fact that it can be heard in Japanese (or even French) on DVD means that I don't have to miss it. The best thing is that there are optional Japanese subtitles! Is this a sly little F.U. to the Mishima estate? If only it were a region-free disc.
Rating:
Summary: Intense and Engaging
Review: What a wonderful film. I initally picked it up because, as a fan of George Lucas, I own every film that Lucasfilm put out. Lucas' involvement with this particular film was pretty minimal -- he funded it and provided the studio support -- but the reasons for his attraction to the project are obvious. The film makes wonderful use of color, black-and-white, and early technicolor, as well as imaginative, minimalist sets to (abstractly) tell the story of Yukio Mishima, one of the most important Japanese writers and gay men of the twentieth century. As a gay man, a student of gay history, and a person interested in biographical history in general, I wish the film would've spent a bit more time on Mishima's homosexuality, but resistance from his wife (largely of convenience) made this difficult. Nonetheless the film is a tremendously underrated masterpiece and should not be missed.
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Summary: Why ... please tell me! .... Why?
Review: While in college I accidentally discovered this film as it was part of a double feature in a New York City theater. Although it was a very late showing, and my lady companion had fallen asleep in her seat, I could not leave because this film had quickly captured my facination. At films end, I was overwhelmed by this masterpiece of sheer beauty and artful execution. Few films have ever impressed me as much as this one. I have anxiously awaited the release of this film on DVD for years! Especially with respect to the profound Phillip Glass score. With eager enthusiasm I began to watch the DVD adaptation of this film. Strangely, I first thought there was something wrong with my DVD player, because the narration voice sounded distored. Shortly thereafter my heart sunk when I realized the original narration by Roy Scheider had been replaced by another voice, which, in my opinion, does not do this film justice. The DVD version does add the benefit of directors commentary, but I suggest that the VHS version, which carries the original narration, is preferred. Mr. Schrader, how could you let this happen to such a work of Art! Please tell me ... Why?
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Summary: A question for Paul Schrader?
Review: While it's always good for an author - or in this case a director - to respond directly on amazon (OK one might make an exception for Anne Rice's bizarre outbursts and for the various authors and publishers who submitted pseudonymous reviews to puff up their star ratings), Paul Schrader's comment a few posts below left me no wiser about what happened to the narration.
In the original film and VHS video release this was read by Roy Scheider in a wonderful smoky voice that perfectly fitted the material.
Judging by the reviews below (I don't have this version myself), this has been mysteriously replaced by a much inferior voiceover for the DVD.
Paul's comment seems to indicate that Lucasfilm re-recorded the narration for this DVD so that it included Ken Ogata's version in Japanese (a good thing as the film was not properly released in Japan first time round because of the Mishima estate's opposition and presumably the difficult political subject matter).
So did they get Roy to do it again in English (and apparently so badly - or at least differently - that most reviewers who mention it don't think it's him)?
After all the great advantage of DVD technology over video is that you can have multiple soundtracks and subtitles.
So Paul - please clarify further?
I love this film (thus the 5-stars) but I am probably not the only fan who is having second thoughts about buying this edition based on the reviews below.
Even if you didn't like the original narration - which puts it into 'director's cut' territory - it would still help if you explained this more clearly, so we know what we are buying and why it differs from the movie we saw in the cinema back in the 1980s.
Rating:
Summary: A brave and weird film about a brave and weird man
Review: While much of the late-60s/early-70s US brat-pack film-makers have either gone on to commercial sugar (Lucas, Spielberg) or leftfield crankiness (Coppola and, increasingly, Scorsese), Paul Schrader has quietly gone on making his odd, dark, personal movies. "Mishima" will probably go down as his best film. A lot of people watch it and enjoy it without making the connection that this director is the guy who wrote "Taxi Driver", and yet the continuity is there. The film is a two-hour, formally immaculate meditation on the life and work - and the degree to which the two things merged - of the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Mishima himself was a contradictory character, an ebullient and dedicated family man who flaunted his homosexuality and his morbid interest in sex'n'death, and if he hadn't been born then Schrader would probably have invented him. Cinematographer John Bailey deserves some credit for the boldness of the film's three different styles: solemn black and white for the passages of Mishima's biography, lurid colour for the dramatisations of selected Mishima works, and tense natural colour for the framing device, the last hours of Mishima's life, in which he unsuccessfully attempted to incite an Army mutiny before cutting his stomach open in the garrison commander's office. Ken Ogata is powerfully present in the title role, even if he doesn't look remotely like Mishima. Schrader later ruefully admitted that Ogata's persona in Japan is more associated with genial comedy and good-guy roles than with driven artist-heroes, but it seemed that nobody else would take the role - so hats off to Ogata, then, for having the courage. Also excellent are Kenji Sawada, Yasosuke Bando and Toshiyuki Nagashima as Mishima's fictional alter-egos. The "fiction" bits are the most striking visually. Schrader and his production designer Eiko Ishioka go for a deliberate theatricality; the sets are blatantly stylised, as if for theatre (Mishima was also a successful playwright and incorrigible self-dramatist unto the end) and some of the film's most startling moments are in the final fictional excerpt, a highly condensed version of Mishima's penultimate novel, Runaway Horses. Yet the other two styles are beautifully considered. The silvery monochrome of the bio sections - the closest it comes to being your standard biopic - recall the serene repose of classic Japanese directors like Ozu and Mizoguchi, especially in the bits about Mishima's early life. The jerky, hand-held feel of the Last Day sequences is a sort of homage to the best work of Costa-Gavras; the quivering present-tense is the best way to convey what was basically an aborted terrorist attack. Philip Glass' music seems for once both apt and moving. Normally minimalism annoys...me, but in the context of a story about a deeply obsessive man, it's dead on. Schrader's brother Leonard co-wrote the screenplay and is apparently the real expert in the family on Japan. Either way, it's hard to think of another American film-maker who would go so far to try and understand a foreign culture, and make the effort to be so faithful to it. (Thumbs up to George Lucas and Francis Coppola, then, who co-produced it.) If "Mishima" seems in the end like an American film, it's in the context of Schrader's own work as a writer and director. He has always been fascinated by driven, violent outsiders, so Mishima must have seemed the perfect subject, a highly intelligent man who was fully aware of his own capacity for violence and who, in the end, opened himself up to it as what must have seemed the fulfilment of his life. We can never, now, read Mishima's works without knowing how he died, and this, presumably, was the point. It's interesting that his most illustrious writer friend, the Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata, committed suicide only a few years after Mishima's death, as if in abjection towards his wilder, younger colleague. It's a beautiful and disturbing film, deeply unfashionable (I defy you to think of 6 other great films that came out in 1985) and truly memorable. It deserves better than to be on sale for 80 dollars. It cost me 17 quid in a Dublin video shop.
Rating:
Summary: a well done portrayal
Review: While not completely factual, the film takes the watcher on a journey of Mishima's struggles, both as a person and a writer. Without attempting to analyze him or his works, the portrayal of the man is extremely well done and tasteful. We may never know exactly what Mishima felt, but the turmoil of his life - its conflicts, idealism, confusion and passion - are put forth for the viewer no to judge, but simply to experience.
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