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August 15, 2008

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 9

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The stranger they come, the harder they fall

Two beautiful DVD releases highlight an odd chapter in LGBT history

On November 25, 1970, celebrated writer Yukio Mishima, along with four accomplices, seized control of Japan's military headquarters in Tokyo. After publicly reading a passionate manifesto to the gathered troops, Mishima committed seppuku, ritually disemboweling himself.

The Criterion Collection has now released two films, Patriotism and Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, that examine the motives behind the ritual suicide of this controversial figure in LGBT history.

Mishima was considered one of the finest Japanese authors and playwrights of the 20th century. His works were nominated three times for the Nobel Prize in Literature by the time he died at the age of 45.

His most famous work was the novel Confessions of a Mask. It is the story of a young gay man who feels he must wear a façade to protect himself from traditional Japanese society, a pressure Mishima said he felt in his own life.

A clearer picture of this complex, peculiar man emerges from both of the Criterion films, gloriously given the usual treatment with the best in picture, sound, and packaging.

Patriotism (1966) is Mishima's sole directorial credit. The 30-minute film is an adaptation of his own short story, included in the handsome DVD booklet.

The film offers the most solid evidence of Mishima's philosophies on the honor and beauty of seppuku.

It tells of a soldier and his wife, both resolved to committing ritual suicide. Mishima plays the handsome, mysterious soldier five years before he performed

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the identical act in real life.

Mishima's fascination with the male form seems to include a fascination with his own body. He fills the film with close-ups of his own nude flesh, beauty turned beautifully gory.

Performed on the No stage in the Kabuki tradition, the film is a stylized and silent exploration of the link between sexuality and death. Even in its grotesqueness, the film is elegant and hypnotic.

In Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), director Paul Schrader frames his visually stunning biopic within the events

of the author's final day. Schrader pieces together Mishima's motives by using shimmering black and white for flashbacks and truly awe-inspiring surrealism to dramatize excerpts from three of Mishima's novels. Philip Glass' rich, driving score marries the film's multiple layers perfectly.

Though he depicts a young Mishima masturbating to a painting of a nude Saint Sebastian, Schrader is more subtle about Mishima's adult homosexuality.

Schrader emphasizes the closeness of his frequently half-nude male characters dining, exercising, and showering together.

However, all of this is expressed as part of the male camaraderie of samurai culture, a justification Mishima himself used to accept his own sexuality.

Both films buck traditional structure, and serve to better understand the man's psyche more than the actual details of his life. Rather than biography, both films unfold as abstract meditations on the themes that inhabited Mishima's mind and art.

Though neither film fully solves the mystery that was Yukio Mishima, searching for the answers certainly makes for stunning cinema.

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Above: Butterfly Brooch, c. 1895-1905. Unknown maker, France. Diamonds, silver gold. Private Collection

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