Criterion Confessions

The year is 1630. The capital of Japan is still under its original name, Edo, and though samurais still exist, the shogunate has severely lessened their power. An older, bearded swordsman appears at the gate to the estate of Lord Iyi, a still thriving patriarch. Having lost his own master, this samurai has been a ronin for many years. Tired of eking out a living and only finding starvation for his efforts, he requests that Iyi's men let him use the spacious courtyard of their compound as a place to commit ritual suicide, formally known as "seppuku" but also called "harakiri." Indeed, the original title of Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 film was Seppuku in Japan, but it was likely changed to Harakiri for international release as that is the more commonly known term worldwide.

Respected Japanese actor Tatsuya Nakadai stars as Hanshiro Tsugumo, the swordsman at the end of his tether looking for an honorable death. Rentaro Mikuni is Counselor Saito, the man charged with managing the daily goings-on at the Iyi manor. Saito is suspicious of Tsugumo's motives, as it has become commonplace for ronin to show up at rich homes claiming to be seeking a place to die but really looking to extort money from a well-to-do family who doesn't want the public disgrace of a dead warrior in their front yard. This scam began honestly, when one of the many samurai left in the cold by shogunate reform legitimately sought a nice place to spend his last breath. The clan he went to was so impressed by his sincerity, that they gave him a job; those who followed this have been con artists.



In fact, Tsugumo is not the first to come to the Iyi manner seeking this kind of asylum. Several months before, a younger man named Chijiwa (Akira Ishihama) arrived under similar circumstances. Saito and his men doubted his intentions, too, but ultimately, they made him carry out his promise. Chijiwa's tortuous death is the grisliest scenes in the movie, and Saito's detailed explanation of the disembowelment--which we see as an actual flashback--is meant to dissuade Tsugumo from pushing the matter further. The audience may be unsettled by the painful self-immolation (I certainly was), but Tsugumo is not. He insists on going ahead, his desire to die is very real.

Harakiri's twist, however, is that despite his true intentions, Tsugumo has not revealed his full motivation. The former warrior was a father and a grandfather who watched his family's livelihood dwindle as he clung to an unyielding code of honor--one he has decided that others higher up the food chain have not been as dedicated to. His narrative is more entangled in recent events at the Iyi manor than was originally apparent. The reality of what is happening grows more knotted and tragic the deeper Tsugumo draws us in. The movie may be black-and-white, but its often-grotesque tapestry is anything but. The hubris of the Iyi clan is they demanded simplicity because it was easier for them to deal with, even though life is far more complex.


Tatsuya Nakadai is astounding in the lead role. He plays present-day Tsugumo as a man who is staunchly resolute. He quietly commands the room, wresting control from Saito in ways both bold and manipulative. When insisting that the counselor and his retainers continue listening to his story doesn't work, he has other gambits waiting to be played. In the flashbacks, the actor is afforded the opportunity to show his range. Tsugumo's life swings from happiness to heartache, and the unraveling of his confidence is devastating to behold. The performer shows just as much strength in the battle scenes, finding a balance between an old warrior's confidence and his somewhat faulty muscle memory. He is not as strong or as agile as he once was, and Nakadai is careful to show, through gesture and expression, that it's righteous passion that allows this samurai to not just hold his own, but to best his opponents.



Fans of Japanese cinema likely know Nakadai from his work with Akira Kurosawa, including High and Low [review], where he proved himself more than an able co-star next to the great Toshiro Mifune, but also later in life as the unhinged father in Ran [review]. It's an impressive career even before you factor in his previous collaboration with Masaki Kobayashi, the towering epic The Human Condition [review]. Comparing that multi-part drama with this one is a bit like comparing apples and oranges, but they both stand tall as portrayals of individuals pushed as far as they can be pushed. It's a dramatic situation both timeless and timely: when the system fails to protect the people it was created to serve, when those at the upper levels of power forget about individuals that form the basis for their rule, those desperate for justice will find a way to get their due. Not that any victory is clean. Following a harrowing, tension-filled climax, Harakiri has a bitter denouement. The cynical message: if you're going to strike at a snake, you'd best take out the head, or its venom will still have an outlet to poison the world further.



Kobayashi works here from a script by Shinobu Hashimoto. The film is tightly constructed on two different timelines, and the writer makes smart decisions of when to click back and forth between past and present. In some ways, Harakiri is like a mystery. We know, in essence, who killed Chijiwa, but the metaphorical culprit, the source of the misery that led him to the murder scene, still needs to be uncovered. Cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima works in the tight hallways of the palace and even the tighter quarters of Tsugumo's impoverished hovel, to choreograph the narrative and emphasize just how trapped the ronin really is. The courtyard where the suicides take place boxes the victims in, and yet the estate that surrounds them is like a maze. On his climactic dash through the Iyi home, Tsugumo breaks through different walls, each one revealing another layer of the internal bureaucracy. As a metaphor for the lone citizen taking on the system, it's incredibly powerful. What Tsugumo finds there is ultimately hollow, and thus Harakiri is all the more unnerving. If you don't walk away from this movie shaken all the way down to your shoes, I'm not sure you were really watching what was going on.



Criterion first released Harakiri back in 2005 as a two-disc DVD set. As the screengrabs here show, the restoration done back then was impressive enough already, but the high-def Blu-Ray transfer is a thing of beauty. The black-and-white photography is sharper than ever before, with rich, deep detail and incredible textures. Close-ups on the actors in tense moments reveal so much about the pain and fear the characters are suffering just by letting us see the sweat on their brow and the tears in their eyes so vividly.

The new edition also keeps all the extras from the previous set, including an interview between Masaki Kobayashi and Double Suicide-director Masahiro Shinoda (that makes for a fitting duo, if not a depressing double feature). There are also more recent interviews with Nakadai and Hashimoto and a pretty cool poster gallery.



There is a 3D remake of Harakiri on the way, helmed by irascible Japanese madman Takashi Miike. It will be interesting to see how Miike handles the material. I'd have thought him a pretty poor choice for Harakiri--and really, would have been against remaking what is essentially a perfect film--before seeing his masterful redo of the samurai showdown picture 13 Assassins [review]. The concept of ritual suicide certainly has the potential for different avenues of exploration. Let's not forget that just three years after Kobayashi stormed Cannes with Harakiri, bad-boy author Yukio Mishima unleashed his short film Patriotism [review], a film that is just as vivid in its gruesome details but with a decidedly different point of view. Whereas Kobayashi decides that seppuku is an empty gesture given foolishly in deference to an uncaring power structure, Mishima considers it the ultimate expression of fealty to something greater than yourself (for him, Japan). Both films are effective, though ultimately, Kobayashi's is more fulfilling and easily more persuasive.




This disc was provided by the Criterion Collection for purposes of review.

Please Note: The screen captures used here are from the standard-definition DVD released in 2000, not from the Blu-ray edition under review.

This may sound strange or even reductionist, but I think Japanese director Koreyoshi Kurahara's style is most easily summed up via his credits sequences. The films in the boxed set The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara, the 28th entry in Criterion's Eclipse series, come from different genres and have varied tones and styles, but the filmmaker's approach to the titles, with one exception, remains consistent. After an introductory scene, Kurahara carefully chooses a moment to freeze the image, introducing the name of the picture on top of this still, capturing his characters in flux. Sometimes it's serious and shocking, sometimes it's hilarious and humiliating. Then the rest of the credits roll with the image stopping and starting, the text juxtaposed with the isolated moments, working with the music to indicate the emotional weather patterns inside the atmosphere we are now entering. These sequences are always stylish and never dull, and Kurahara often closes his films in a similar matter, reminding us at the outset and at the finish that this is cinema, it is artifice, even as he asks us to step into a realm that is entirely his own.

Kurahara was a contract worker at Nikkatsu studios starting in the late 1950s; he continued making films well into his later life, though regularly altering his style in unpredictable ways. Warped World picks up in 1960 as the director experienced an artistic sea change, coming into his own through standard genre pictures, eventually exploring his personal vision using popular stars in vehicles that look familiar when taken at face value but turn out to be stranger and more unique than they initially appeared. Kurahara's films tend to follow characters who have become trapped and are desperate for a way out. Some of them are reserved and calculating, others are agitated and rebellious. Not all of the quintet represented here hit with the same accuracy, but part of the point of the collection is to illustrate how versatile Kurahara was. The scattershot approach means there likely won't be a bull's-eye every time, but generally, he gets close enough.

The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara kicks off with a bang. Intimidation (1960; 65 minutes) is a tight crime thriller, a story of blackmail and double-crosses that is sometimes called the first Japanese film noir. (As always, the use of the tag is debatable; I think Hitchcock's Rope, or his TV show, is a more apropos reference point.) Bank manager Takita (Nobuo Kaneko) is heading to a promotion at the main branch--coincidentally, run by his father-in-law--when a local gangster (Kojiro Kusanagi) threatens to expose some bad loans he extended himself unless Takita pays him 3 million yen. He suggests Takita rob his own bank, since no one will ever suspect the boss of thieving. Seeing no way out, Takita tries to pull of a late-night heist. Despite his best efforts to keep him out of it, Takita's assistant Nakaike (Akira Nishimura, The Bad Sleep Well [review]) gets tangled in the burgling. Nakaike has been under Takita's thumb his whole life. The other man jilted Nakaike's sister, Umeha (Mari Shiraki), to marry Kumiko (Yoko Kozono), who was Nakaike's girlfriend at the time. Had Nakaike married her, he'd be in Takita's professional position; instead, he warms the man's sake. Insult to injury, Takita is still having an affair with Umeha. We see a predatory chain running through this community: Takita may be intimidated by a crook, but he has been intimidating Nakaike in one way or another their entire lives.

When you think about it, that's a lot of backstory for a movie that barely crests an hour in length, but Kurahara has wound these things so tight, you'd barely notice. The screenplay is by Osamu Kawase, from a story by Kyo Takigawa, and Kurahara stages their material with precision. What at first appears to be mannered social drama quickly gives way to pulpy twists and turns, with the actual bank robbery staged in nail-biting silence, like a more direct take on Dassin's safecracking in Rififi [review]. From that point on, the change-ups come pretty quick. Pardon the referential joke, but it's all downhill from there. Kurahara and cinematographer Yoshihiro Yamazaki compose elegant shots, arranging the actors throughout the scene to emphasize their hidden relationships, while using tight close-ups to underline their anxiety. Intimidation is a sophisticated genre exercise that will keep you guessing right up until the memorable final moments. It's a movie where no one gets what they want, where all selfish intentions yield empty results, and innocence is as ephemeral as a flame from a lighter.

The same year that Kurahara made Intimidation, he also made the juvenile delinquent picture The Warped Ones (1960; 75 minutes). Part of the "Sun Tribe" subgenre chronicling the frustrations of post-War Japanese youth, The Warped Ones is a semi-formless picture, its verité style mirroring the aimless day-to-day of its criminal subjects, bookended by those energetic freeze frames to emphasize the feeling that these are stolen moments, snapshots arrested in time.

Tamio Kawachi, a regular participant in Seijun Suzuki films, stars in The Warped Ones as Akira, a petty thug and pickpocket. Akira appears to be in a state of constant agitation. He is always overheated, always squirming; he looks like he would claw off his own skin if he could. He hangs around with a prostitute named Yuki (Yuko Chishiro), and the pair of them gets arrested when a straight-laced newspaper reporter (Hiroyuki Nagato) helps the cops pull a sting on them in the jazz club. When Akira gets out of prison a month later, he has a new friend, another crook named Masaru (Eiji Go).

While joyriding in a stolen car, the trio run across the snitch and his girlfriend, an abstract painter named Fumiko (Noriko Matsumoto). They kidnap Fumiko, and Akira rapes her. Telling her where the police station is after he is done is the closest the jerk gets to compassion, and it suggests that maybe she has gotten under his skin in some way. When she tracks him down weeks later to tell him she has gotten pregnant, he rejects her, but then shortly after, he seeks her out. It's an emotionally harrowing push-and-pull. He doesn't want to be with her, but he won't stay away from her. Things get even more complicated when Fumiko encourages Yuki to seduce the reporter so that he'll feel the same shame she feels; her intention that if he is also sexually abused, they will be equal again, but that backfires. (Men are dogs, y'all.)

The Warped Ones' jumpy narrative leapfrogs over customary transitions, cutting from scene to scene without much caution for how it all connects together. Time is elastic. This could be one long day, or it could be several months. On one side of the social register, the characters don't express themselves, they don't know how, but the way Kurahara and screenwriter Nobuo Yamada show Fumiko's pretentious art friends behaving, the filmmakers don't have much respect for the hoity toity, either. It's one of the best scenes of the movie. Akira wanders into Fumiko's party and is immediately humiliated by her friends, who view him as a living art exhibit, an example of a primitive man wandering the modern streets. (You know, like Kramer in that one episode of Seinfeld.) They laugh at him with the same cruel abandon that he and his pals laugh at the misfortune of their victims. In fact, despite the harsh twists of fate that follow, that laughter keeps going, building to a maniacal pitch (alongside their increased disregard for human life) in the film's final shot. It's framed from a god's eye point of view (a stylistic trademark of Kurahara's), as if to say life is absurd, it will always be absurd, and Akira can toss as many guffaws to the heavens as he can muster, but the heavens will never answer.

[Note: The credits and liner notes on the Warped Ones box suggest that the artist character is Yuki and the prostitute is Fumiko. Indeed, all articles on the film, including the IMDB and Wikipedia entries, say the same thing. The dialogue and onscreen text in the actual film has the names switched, however, so I have followed what I saw and heard, and have decided that the actresses attached are correct for each name based on Yuko Chishiro's return to the role of Yuki in the later film Black Sun.

The 1964 film I Hate But Love (105 mins.) seems as far away from The Warped Ones as you can get, but though the romantic comedy appears on the surface to follow a standard line, it's actually extremely off-model in terms of genre expectations.

It begins like any number of 1960s love stories, with two career-minded lovers juggling work and romance and failing to find a balance. Daisaku Kita, played by matinee idol Yujiro Ishihara, is a popular media personality who hosts a TV show that finds the true stories behind the most intriguing classified ads of the day; his manager, Noriko (Ruriko Asaoka), builds him a packed schedule day in and day out, but never fails to book time for their personal engagements, just the two of them. The business partners have been dating for exactly two years--or as Noriko counts it, 730 days--but their passion is waning, largely because they have been denying it. Wooing is fine, but hands off, buster!

Like I said, this all plays like a glossy Hollywood love story. Even the zippy music by Toshiro Mayuzumi (Reflections In A Golden Eye) would fit right in on the MGM lot, soundtracking the latest coupling of Doris Day and Rock Hudson. I Hate But Love takes a strange turn, however, when the frustrated Kita impulsively agrees to go on a cross-country road trip to fulfill the wish of one of his news subjects. A long-distance love affair between an average woman (Izumi Ashikawa) and a country doctor is about to bear fruit in an unusual way: the woman has saved up to buy the doctor a jeep so he can help more sick people who might not have access to health care otherwise, all she needs is someone to volunteer to drive the vehicle to the mountain village he calls home. Eager to prove that love is real and affirm his own humanity in the process, Kita jumps behind the wheel. Seeing it as career suicide, Noriko chases after him. What follows is a cross-country journey on which the philosophical implications are only outweighed by the media circus that erupts around it. The farther Kita goes, the more fraught his journey becomes; as he grows more determined, Noriko gets more frazzled. It all builds to an oversized climax that has ironic consequences and surprisingly affirmative results.

I Hate But Love is well done, with solid performances from the leads and an assured directorial vision. It's the one movie in The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara to be shot in color. Yoshio Mamiya, who also was DP on The Warped Ones, is behind the camera again, and he makes the best of both real locations and rickety rear-projection to give life to this absurd road trip. I Hate But Love not only reteams him with Kurahara, but it also puts the director back together with Ishida and Asaoka; they made the wildly successful Ginza Love Story that same year. I Hate But Love would prove a big hit.

Yet, I have to admit, I didn't enjoy it all that much. The comic tone at the start of the picture seemed contrived and outdated, while the more serious middle portion struck me as disjointed and straining credibility. That said, the outlandish mountaintop finish kind of makes it all worth it. Though you can likely guess what happens to the central couple, there are several unexpected twists in the final few minutes that definitely prove I Hate But Love to be a rom com of a different stripe.

Tamio Kawachi, star of The Warped Ones, returns for Black Sun (1964; 95 mins.), and so does the anarchic tone. It's a sequel of sorts, featuring analogues of the characters if not the exact same individuals. Whereas the earlier film ended in howls of laughter, however, Black Sun closes with a primal yowl, a sound that mixes both the exhilaration of freedom and despair at its cost.

Kawachi is still a jazz lover and a car thief, but he's not nearly as restless or angry as his younger version. Now he goes by the name Mei and squats in the condemned husk of a Catholic church. Its owners keep threatening to tear it down, and he has replaced the religions icons with photos of great jazz musicians. When Mei isn't stealing cars, he's digging up salvage to buy records. The opening of Black Sun shows him exploring a junkyard. The bombed-out post-War wasteland could just as easily double as a post-apocalyptic landscape, a parallel that is likely intentional. Kurahara's film, including its evocative title, has a doomsday aura around it. Nuclear power plants are visible in the distance. It's both of its time and slightly outside of it. The ruined buildings serve as a constant reminder of the tragic end of World War II, as do the occupying American soldiers that patrol the streets. It's a bit ironic, then, that Mei has embraced one of the popular art forms of the occupiers. Entertainment and junk culture is the greatest weapon of modern colonialism.

Then again, African American musical traditions, be it jazz or rock-and-roll or hip hop, have always had greater political and social significance, something that Kurahara, working again with a script by Nobuyo Yamada, is putting to use in his story. It's rebel music, the anthems of outcasts, and one of those outcasts will change Mei's life. Chico Roland plays Gill, a black soldier who is accused of having gunned down a white serviceman. We don't know if he's guilty, he insists he's not and that the greater "they" are out to kill him. He shows up at Mei's squat with a machine gun and a wounded leg. Mei is excited to meet a real black American, but the language barrier and Gill's desperation put the two at odds. Gill bullies his hostage until the tables turn; Mei gets the gun, and in a bizarre sequence, paints the American's face white and his own face black. Disguised, they leave their hiding place and go to Mei's favorite jazz club, where he shows off Gill as his "slave."

This topsy-turvy relationship is a distorted foreigner's version of The Defiant Ones. The scenario not only speaks to race relations in the 1960s, but also to the tension between Japanese citizens and the Americans, who are squatting in Mei's ruined country just as much as he is living in one of their abandoned churches (a harsh symbol when you consider all the implications). When Gill and Mei hit the road and realize that there is no turning back, the military police have identified both of them and their car, the two men begin to come together, finding that their common bond is that they are being abused by the same white institutions. This all leads to yet another of Kurahara's surprising conclusions. I don't want to give away what causes that scream I referenced earlier. I guarantee, you won't see it coming.

Kawachi is once again very good, though his performance in Black Sun is not nearly as hyperactive as in The Warped Ones. Despite his habit of racial profiling, Mei is essentially a good guy with a genuine enthusiasm for jazz and black culture. He has a greater range of emotions than Akira had: sarcastic, playful, angry, distraught. Unfortunately, Chico Roland is a terrible actor, and his unconvincing performance is hampered by some of the worst ADR this side of an Italian spaghetti western. For as much as his onscreen actions are exaggerated, his vocal performance cranks it up several notches still.

The true MVP of Black Sun is the music. Toshiro Mayuzumi, who so effectively mimicked Hollywood's most ebullient orchestration in I Hate But Love does just as well here crafting a jazz score. Granted, he is helped by having the Max Roach Quartet to record the tunes. (In the credits sequence, Mei goes into a record shop and orders the soundtrack by name.) The bebop not only adds bounce to the more energetic scenes, but in the final act, creates an emotional mood, conveying the sadness and fear of Black Sun's doomed fugitives.

Kurahara shifts gears again for the last film of the series, Thirst for Love (1967; 99 mins.), which also happens to be his final effort as a Nikkatsu regular. This somber, erotically charged film is an adaptation of a novel by infamous Japanese author Yukio Mishima, and it stars I Hate But Love's Ruriko Asaoka as Etsuko, a young woman trapped in a bizarre family after her husband's unexpected death. Some time has passed, and Etsuko's new role in the clan is as her father-in-law's live-in mistress. Her sleeping with the old man (Nobuo Nakamura) might be out of place in another family, but the whole set-up is dysfunctional. Etsuko's brother-in-law (Akira Yamauchi) lives at home with his wife (Yuko Kusunoki), sponging off his father and proud of it. He is sterile, and so has no kids, and he clearly has a thing for Etsuko.

She, on the other hand, is obsessed with their underage handyman, Saburo (Tetsuo Ishidate). She is flattered when she catches him staring at her from outsider her room, angry when he doesn't wear socks she bought special for him. The sexual tension is loin deep, and everyone must wade through it as they would a swamp. The weight of all this desire becomes too much to bear when Saburo impregnates another servant (Chitose Kurenai) and the family meddles in the affair, making plans for their hired hands with little regard for what they may actually want for themselves. The class divide being what it is, they mostly get away with it, too, resenting any resistance. Money is the only weapon either side has: giving it, taking it, extorting it.

Ruriko Asaoka is an alluring screen presence. She has an austere beauty and an uncanny ability to express hidden desire covertly. Thirst for Love smolders like an E.M. Forster or Edith Wharton adaptation. The inexpressible is always on the verge of coming to the surface, the act of denial is more charged than any succumbing to impulse. Kurahara molds his style to the material. This is his quietest film, and though the aesthetic choices aren't as gonzo as previously, they are no less bold. The director, who co-wrote the script, creates an authorial persona, maintaining a certain distance from the material while also trading on the interior lives of his protagonists. Voiceover duties are swapped between different characters, and sometimes the narration appears to be spoken by the director himself (a god's eye view of a different sort). Kurahara and Mamiya often abstract the visuals from the spoken word, showing landscapes at a distance or bodies close up, almost as if divorced from what is being said aloud. Other times, onscreen text relates what can't be shown.

In Thirst for Love, instead of using freeze frame images for the opening credits, Kurahara lingers on Asaoka's naked body, isolating different portions--her stomach, her neck, her shoulder--with a fetishistic eye. Still images appear elsewhere, but in this film, they are the province of memory. Our only glimpses of Etsuko's life with her late husband come via a series of photographs put together in a style reminiscent of Chris Marker. Kurahara also uses this device for present moments of extreme passion, restraining his mis-en-scene as if to make up for Etsuko's lack of the same. He also injects color, using bright red screens to show how hot her lust burns inside of her.

In keeping with Mishima's literary themes, Etsuko's denial of the self is wished for nearly as much as she considers it a torment. She inflicts physical punishment on herself, and also maneuvers to have the situation with Saburo blow up in her face. It may seem like a bizarre route to take, but it ultimately liberates her from the grip of her married family. This is something she has in common with all of Kurahara's protagonists, they all have some kind of arduous metamorphosis prompted by an untenable living situation. Be it the overlooked clerk in Intimidation or Akira/Mei limited by his squalor, or even Daisaku Kita in I Hate But Love being hedged in by fame and exiled from his love by his regrettable arrangement with Noriko, the journeys of struggle that comprises their narratives have a real destination. Whether what they find there is good or bad is debatable in some cases, but all of these characters have moved or changed position in some manner. In Etsuko's case, she literally moves on, stepping at last out of the black-and-white and into the color. Her world has indeed warped, and now it's something completely new.

The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara - Eclipse Series 28 lives up to its title. The five movies here really do show a self-contained image, like a Bizarro World inside a cinematic bell jar. Kurahara's vision of post-War Japan is one where an occupied people struggle with class structures and a lack of opportunity, resorting to drastic measures and selfish gestures. It's a crazy scene, start to finish, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anything quite like it on either side of the Pacific.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk.

1942. A Japanese prison camped for Allied POWs captured in Korea and other parts of Southeast Asia. This is the setting for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Nagisa Oshima's 1983 film of hidden desires behind the barbed-wired fences.

Tom Conti leads the film as Colonel John Lawrence, a British officer with some expertise and experience in Asia. His ability to speak Japanese makes him a valuable liaison between the prison guards and their prisoners, even if it does make some of the other men suspicious. At the start of the movie, Lawrence is roused from sleep by the gruff-voiced Sgt. Gengo Hara (Takeshi Kitano in an early role; he is billed as simply "Takeshi"). One of Hara's men (Johnny Okura) has been caught in a compromising position with a Dutch prisoner (Alistair Browning), and Hara wants Lawrence to both translate for the victim and be witness to what happens. Hara would like to punish his soldier without involving his commander, the aloof Captain Yonoi (musician Ryûichi Sakamoto). Homosexuality is not to be tolerated, particularly if the captor forced himself on the captive.

Yonoi does end up stumbling into the situation, but he has little time for it. He is on his way to base where a tribunal has been called to deal with another captured Brit. Major Jack "Strafer" Celliers (bleached-hair, Let's Dance-era David Bowie) was engaging in what was apparently some pretty effective guerilla warfare before he ran afoul of the Japanese army, and his lack of cooperation now that he is in their hands has confounded the top brass. Yonoi is brought in for some outside perspective--only his superiors don't know how far outside it is. In one of the least subtle "falling in love" scenes you can imagine, Oshima shows Yonoi as hypnotized by the blonde-haired grunt. The music swells, the camera pushes in, Yonoi is transfixed. Benefit of the doubt, maybe Oshima was purposely playing on old-fashioned romance conventions. Regardless, we get the point.

Unsurprisingly, Yonoi takes Celliers back to his prison camp, where his fixation doesn't go unnoticed. Not by Lawrence, Hara, or even Celliers himself. Yonoi tries to show off for his crush; he practices his sword fighting where the convalescing prisoner can hear his grunts and moans. For his part, Celliers becomes a subversive element in the camp, particularly when he challenges Yonoi's orders for a period of fasting by going out and picking edible flowers for his bunkmates. Again, the romantic imagery is pretty clear, though this colorful display is far more effective. If I had a still of the scene, I would caption it like a title from a Bullwinkle cartoon: "Make Love, Not War; or, Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May."

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is a strange picture. It is based on the memoirs of a real prisoner of war, Laurens Van der Post, though the script by Oshima and Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Samurai
) more strongly resembles a Yukio Mishima novel. Like Mishima, the story is concerned with honor and how men conduct themselves in structured situations. Suppressed passions rise up in strange ways, and on a symbolic level, homosexuality is equated with a physical deformity. Not as a value judgment, mind you, both Oshima and Mishima had a broad sexual view, but as something to be hidden lest you be judged. In Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, we see Celliers' early life and his young brother (James Malcolm), who had a hump on his back. Celliers tells Lawrence how he was too morally weak to stand up for his sibling when the pack victimized him, something he considers to be his greatest failing; the events at the POW camp will at long last provide him an opportunity for redemption.

There's a lot of strong stuff in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. The complexity of the drama and the psychology of the characters is fascinating. Lawrence forms an unexpected bond with both Hara and Celliers, driven together by the odd behavior of Yonoi. The Captain's own secret shame ends up connecting to how he finally deals with the alleged rapist (there's some question of what really happened), and he masks his sexual frustration further by trying to assert military dominance over his prisoners. Oshima fumbles again here, playing the movie's climactic moment a little too obviously. Any time a filmmaker shifts into slow-mo to emphasize the important action, they are just asking for trouble. Much of the storytelling in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is both clumsy and old-fashioned, with narrative jumps making some crucial plot points come off as out of joint. Also, the musical score by Ryûichi Sakamoto, which features a lot of '80s synthesizer, is dated and anachronistic. I found it distracting.

Thankfully, the acting is uniformly solid, and this allows the material to rise over any bad directorial choices. As a reviewer, I use the word "solid" a lot, and in this case, I really mean it. There is a consistency to the performances in the movie that is almost as level as a cement slab. Conti, Bowie, and Sakamoto are all good, but unremarkable. Only Takeshi Kitano stands out. He is possessed of a more natural screen charisma than the others, and the camera is magnetically drawn to his orbit. It's no surprise he went on to better things.

Original Theatrical Poster

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence has an impressive final act. The fate of Celliers is macabre, and despite the panting earnestness of the early scenes, Oshima knows that repressed emotions are more effective in this case than any sweaty relief would ever be. Mr. Lawrence is a sad film, one where there is no clear line between right and wrong, and thus no satisfaction for anyone. The melancholy denouement neatly encapsulates all the things the rest of the film touches on: war is destructive, and it causes men to act in ways that are against their nature. The cultures that have been clashing finally get a moment's peace, and they eventually understand each other in some fashion--even if it is only two men, they represent some part of the whole.

Though not a masterpiece, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is an intriguing film. Given the current debate over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the United States Senate, there are even political elements to it that are still relevant. It's hard to say if they are any less progressive now then they were nearly thirty years ago. At one point in the movie, Hara says that, to a samurai, there is no gay or straight, there are just men on the battlefield. Why hang yourself up with worries about anything else? It's a code of honor well worth adopting.

This is the first time that Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence has come to any kind of digital disc in the United States, and Criterion does it up right for their Blu-Ray release. The 1080p high-definition transfer (1.78:1 aspect ratio) has lots of impressive detail. Outdoor scenes look especially good, with vibrant colors and a tremendous clarity. You can practically stop and count the blades of grass. Darker scenes have a little more graininess, as do wider shots. This appears to be the nature of how the film was shot, however, as the transitions seem natural. The overall image appears to be very true to the original intent of the filmmakers.

The bilingual soundtrack is presented here as a DTS-HD Master. The stereo mix creates a nice interspeaker balance with the original audio, creating a decent amount of depth even with a simple 2.0 range.

SIDE NOTE: I was actually surprised to find some fan art online for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, of which the above, by an artist who goes by the moniker Pudding, is the best (original location). Some of it is humorous, some of it a little pervy, most of it done in a manga/anime style. That would suggest the movie has a fairly strong cult following. Use Google image search and nose around for some more if you want.

More surprising is this music mash-up called "Forbidden Young Folks," which combines the vocals from Peter Bjorn & John's "Young Folks" with Ryûichi Sakamoto's melancholy theme from the film.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVDTalk.

Mark Coale, proprietor of Odessa Steps Magazine has posted an older interview he did with me over on his Earth Three blog. The occasion is this week's release of my new comic book with Joëlle Jones, the hardboiled noir-homage You Have Killed Me, as well as San Diego Comic Con International, which Joëlle and I will be attending. You can see our signing schedule here. The above In the Mood for Love inspired drawing was done for Mark's publication, and the line art is being used as a con-exclusive bookplate, as well.

You can read the piece in its entirety on Mark's blog. He and I share a magnificent Criterion obsession, and he asks me a few question about that, as well.

Q: As of this writing [Summer 2008], what's the best Criterion you've watched lately?

A: I had a weekend where I watched Yukio Mishima's Patriotism and then Mishima, Paul Schrader's biopic of the Japanese author, back to back. In terms of packaging and content, both were excellent, and though I'd had some limited contact with Mishima in years past, these films made me realize I probably should delve deeper into his library. As a person and as a writer, he had a lot of similar concerns to what shows up in my work, including a romantic yearning to stand against the tide and to, essentially, stand for something rather than caving in to modernity. He was also preoccupied with suicide, as are many of my characters. If you watch Patriotism, which he wrote, directed, and starred in, and you see him playing a Japanese solider disemboweling himself, it's quite powerful, particularly when you chase it with the Schrader picture and all the extras that come with it and hear about how he ended his own life the same way. It's easy to see why his widow demanded the movie be buried while she was alive. The scene in Patriotism where he slices his belly open is gruesome, and not just by 1960s standards, but any standards.

Q: Here's the obligatory Desert Island question. What five Criterions would you take with you? Feel free to cheat and name box sets as one entry.

A: In the Mood For Love, dir. Wong Kar-Wai
The Cranes are Flying, dir. Mikhail Kalatozov
Days of Heaven, dir. Terrence Malick
Contempt, dir. Jean-Luc Godard
Sullivan's Travels, dir. Preston Sturges

The first three are pretty rock solid. Godard would also always take
the fourth slot, though there are a couple of others I might debate
over. I'd also be able to change the last slot a million times before
walking out the door, but I figure I needed a comedy in there.

I can't believe I've only reviewed one of those five. I'll have to do something about that!

Read a large preview of You Have Killed Me.

Paul Schrader's 1985 biopic of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, is a thoughtful and inventive examination of a writer's life and how it both influences and is influenced by his work. It's a rare case of a willfully arty film that manages to make the question of style over substance immaterial, as they ultimately are one and the same.

As the title suggests, Mishima is broken into four sections, each meant to portray an important stage in the author's life and show the progression of his ideas toward the extreme activist he would eventually become. Each chapter begins with a "present day" sequence that takes place on November 25, 1970, the day Mishima (played by Ken Ogata, recently seen in The Hidden Blade) and four soldiers from his private army, the Shield Society, took a general in the Japanese army prisoner in an attempt to commandeer his troops, overthrow the capitalist government, and return the emperor to the seat of power. When this coup failed to yield results, Mishima committed seppuku, or ritual suicide, rather than see his ideals fizzle. (Some believe this was intention all along, that Mishima never expected the plan to work and was more concerned with setting the stage of a spectacular death.)

From these scenes of Mishima on his way to his mission, Schrader shifts each of the first three chapters into the writer's past. Starting with the boy at age 5 (Yuki Nagahara) and working his way forward into his teen years, and then into his artistic triumphs and adulthood. The flashbacks are all filmed in black-and-white, which serves to differentiate them from the second stories. In addition to the flashbacks, Schrader also chooses one of Mishima's many novels that best exemplifies that period of the work, and he creates a miniature adaptation of said work.

The story begins with chapter 1, "Beauty," where the awkward young boy grows into a man, looking to change his position as a misfit in this world and embrace love and the goodness that life has to offer, the things that are beauty personified. For this section, Schrader chooses to adapt the 1953 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, the story of a Buddhist acolyte (Yasosuke Bando) with a severe stuttering problem whose "deformity" prevents him from finding love, forcing him to always remain separate. He fixates on the golden temple where he is studying and eventually becomes intent on its destruction. Turning it to rubble blots out the false promise he can never fulfill. This action actually teaches him something about beauty, about how it's best to halt it at its apex rather than let age diminish its luster.

From there, Schrader moves to chapter 2, "Art," where Mishima, tasting his first blush of success, begins to ponder how to resolve the false and finite nature of beauty and realize the artist's purpose of preserving said beauty. In his novel Kyoko's Place a young actor turned body builder (Kenji Sawada) realizes that despite his personal perfection, bodies decay. Art is nice, but it requires no sacrifice. He enters into an abusive relationship with a female gangster (Setsuko Karasuma) who begins to use his body as a living sculpture. Real blood is a greater expression of true beauty and art than the false blood spilled on a theatrical stage.

This lesson informs chapter 3, "Action," where Mishima begins to question his role in the world. Words can express ideas, but like how beauty without art fades, so too do ideas go nowhere without action to back them up. The novel for this section is Runaway Horses, a later work about a young soldier (Toshiyuki Nagashima) who forms a cabal of like-minded youths to stage a revolution and restore Japan's honor. As his plan falls apart, he tries one last action before turning his sword on himself. Here the fiction dovetails nicely with the reality, as we go into chapter 4, "Harmony of Pen and Sword," which concerns itself entirely with Mishima's last day on Earth, along with commentary taken from his last book of personal writing, Sun and Steel. (Again, fiction gives way to reality--though reality as seen by Yukio Mishima.)

Each of the novel adaptations is filmed in a colorful, abstract style that borrows from classical and contemporary theatre. Golden Pavilion is the most abstracted, with the sets being obvious facades, while Kyoko reflects a more neon and illusory 1950s. As Schrader moves the timeline forward, each style gets a little more realistic, until it collides with the reality of Mishima's story and the actions of the Shield Society. All of the chapters show the parallels between the writer's life and his fictions, with his childhood struggles to be understood transforming into the acolyte's stuttering, his destruction of canonized literary stylizations being his razing of the Golden Pavilion. So, too, is he later a stage actor, a body builder, and the revolutionary soldier, as the man of letters wrestles with his self-image and the truth of his self-expression.

It's as deep as I've seen anyone go into the life of an artist, certainly multiple steps up from the overly obvious moments of inspiration we see in modern biopics of creative types of various stripes. Schrader and his co-writers, Leonard Schrader (his brother) and the Japanese adapter Chieko Schrader (his sister-in-law), are searching for the true connections, going beyond the standard tale of one life and digging deep into material to show how the writer lives many different existences. He borrows from real events to inform his fiction, but then must alter his life to live up to the ideal he created for himself.

Through it all, Mishima's obsession with death is clear. From his missed opportunity to die for his country in WWII (his own surprising cowardice haunting him ever since) and his study of samurai texts, he begins to dream of an exit that has greater meaning than passing away from old age while home in bed. If action is the only way to give ideas true meaning, then the final action must matter, too.

Though ostensibly an American production--Mishima was produced by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola for Coppola's Zoetrope Studios--the film was shot entirely in Tokyo using Japanese actors speaking Japanese. The distinctive costume and production design was also by a Japanese artisan, Eiko Ishioka, who prior to this had worked in mediums other than film, but has since gone on to design costumes for Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Cell, among others. She brings a special flare to the novel sequences, creating an alternate reality in keeping with Yukio Mishima's unique vision. The author's estate initially cooperated with the production, but later withdrew their support over objections of depictions of Mishima's sexuality. Likewise, the Japanese government didn't like seeing the writer's rebellion glamorized, and so the film has never been released theatrically or on video in Japan. (Though, oddly, it can be show on TV, but only with the homosexuality censored.)

It's a bizarre contradiction. The author's work is still venerated in his home country, so why must his life be taboo? Could the irony be that in the act Mishima saw as his final achievement of his artistic ideal, he actually boomeranged back to being the outcast?

Criterion releases Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters as a double-disc set in conjunction with its separate release of the short film Mishima wrote, directed, and starred in himself. 1966's Patriotism adapts a short story he wrote about a soldier and his wife committing seppuku in 1936, and two scenes about the filming and release of Patriotism are included in Mishima. For information about Patriotism, read my review of it here.

Though Mishima was released on DVD by Warner Bros. in 2001, it has been out of print for some time. That disc generally got very high marks. There have been some changes made between the transfer seven years ago and the new one, however, some of which will be up to debate as far as what some people might prefer, but all of which are approved by Paul Schrader and cinematographer John Bailey, so ultimately you'll have to take it up with them.

The most notable change, and the one that should make just about everyone happy is that the old transfer was a 1.75:1 aspect ratio, and the Criterion disc restores the film to its original ratio of 1.85:1, meaning more information now appears on screen. There have been some color changes and digital enhancements made to some scenes on Schrader's insistence, and these will only be noticeable to those who know the old DVD by heart. Overall, I thought this transfer looked pretty good, with the distinctive color schemes popping in all the right ways and none of the pixilation that sometimes marred the older release.

2001

2008

2001

2008

Overall, I think the colors of the movie pop way more in the new version, while the old one looks faded and grainy by comparison.

The original Japanese soundtrack has been mixed in Dolby Digital stereo and sounds very good. Philip Glass' marvelous score for the picture is the true test of any mix of this movie, and his orchestration rings through loud and clear.

There are a couple of alternate audio options for viewers to choose from. There were several versions of the narration recorded for the movie. The default option is the Japanese language narration, but you can also choose the late Roy Scheider's English voiceover that was included in the theatrical release or Paul Schrader's somewhat different voiceover recorded as a guide track for Scheider (available here for the first time; the other two options were on the old DVD).

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters - Criterion Collection is a beautiful art object unto itself. Really, Criterion deserves a round of applause for this one. Designer Neil Kellerhouse, along with co-art director Sarah Habibi, has created a bright, embossed boxed set that is as garishly distinctive as Eiko Ishioka's set design and that also plays on the puzzle element of the movie's structure. The outer slipcase has enough room to hold both the DVD sleeve and the 56-page book that comes in the set. The four-sided gatefold sleeve has two trays for the DVDs and a breakdown of the four chapters of the movie printed on the inside. The book has photos, credits, a new critical essay by Schrader-expert Kevin Jackson, information on the film's ban in Japan, and an on-set account from Eiko Ishioka.

Sometimes a DVD set comes along where the nature of a unique production is matched by an equally extraordinary DVD package. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters - Criterion Collection is one of those sets. Paul Schrader's biopic of the controversial and provocative Japanese author works on multiple levels to break down the writer's life, to show how much of it is interior and how fact and fiction blend into one another. From the script to the production design and the music, every stage of this production strove for something special. This new double-disc set peels the curtain back further to show us how they achieved what they did and more about the reality of the subject. This is one other art films should emulate when making their way to DVD. Don't just fill the space, but fill it well--a sentiment Yukio Mishima could likely get behind.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.