If everything goes as planned, a most curious gap in the history of Japanese cinema could soon end.
The 38th edition of the Tokyo International Film Festival revealed on Wednesday that it had scheduled a retrospective projection of the now classic literary biopic of Paul Schrader Mishima: a life in four chapters. It will be the first effective Japan in the film – about 40 years late.
The film path to Japanese screens was tortured to the extreme – and in many ways, it is a wonder that it even exists. Co-written and directed by Schrader less than a decade after he became a Hollywood name for the scripts Taxi driverThe film was supported by Francis Ford Coppola and Zoetrope Pictures by George Lucas during one of his most active periods. Turned entirely in Japan with an entirely Japanese distribution, the film explores in a lively way the life and ideas of the most controversial literary iconoclast in the country, Yukio Mishima, the nominated novelist for the Nobel Prize in literature five times before taking his own life by a ritual suicide after having directed a failed attempt to restore the Emperor of Japan to be able to be able. An incredibly original work of literary adaptation, the film interlaces episodes of Mishima’s life with stylized dramatizations of moments of his books, because a partition of Philip glass in the course of cinematographic connective tissue.
The film has been a critical feeling since its release. He won the best artistic contribution price at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, and Roger Ebert later called it “the most unconventional biopic I have ever seen, and one of the best”. The collection of criteria restored and reissued the film in 2008, guaranteeing its cult status, while the directors of Martin Scorsese in Guillermo del Toro publicly quoted it as masterpieces of Schrader.
But it was an unmistakable flop in its time, and largely because of its prohibited reception in Japan.
Although he was co-financed by the country’s first studio, Toho Towa, and with the venerated of the local actor Ken Ogata in the title role, the theatrical ambitions of the film in Japan derailed before having had the chance to reach the public. In the mid -1980s, Mishima’s position in Japan remained deeply in conflict: revered in literary circles as a stylist of rare shine and frequent candidate of the Nobel Prize, but also mythologized by the extreme right as a martyr for imperial catering. Its end Luride – public septuku After the failure of the coup attempt in 1970 – left him both a sustainable cultural icon and a radioactive subject.
“Mishima: a life in four chapters”
Bfi
The frank representation of the film of the bisexual obsessions of Mishima and the radical political campaign, not to mention the involvement of foreign filmmakers like Schrader, Coppola and Lucas, attracted a boycott of the widow of Mishima and exasperated the ultra-right political groups which continued to lionize. Tokyo theaters would have received threats of violence and Toho quickly withdrew his support for domestic release. The film was also withdrawn from the Tokyo International Film Festival this year.
To date, the spectrum of these initial threats, and the political sensitivities they have exhibited, have kept distributors and festival programmers. Although the film has sometimes surfaced in academic circles, it remained officially invisible by the general Japanese public.
Sources close to the Tokyo Film Festival told The Hollywood Reporter Wednesday that a projection of Mishima During this year’s edition, from October 27 to November 7, was scheduled for October 30. They declared that Schrader had expressed his interest in returning to Japan to discuss the festival film, but that his participation is still uncertain and that the sensitivities perceived could make the promotion of the projection “difficult” for the organizers. The decision to finally project the film was taken in the light of the 100th anniversary of this year of the birth of Mishima in 1925, they said.
Over the years, Schrader, now 79 years old, said on several occasions that he considered it Mishima his best work as a director (while Taxi driver remains his favorite as a screenwriter). Thinking about his 50 -year career at the Venice Film Festival in 2022, where he received an honorary golden lion, he said: “My favorite is Mishima: a life in four chaptersJust because it’s the most damned thing. I still can’t believe that I have never directed this film. “”
