With writer/director Paul Schrader currently in the news for his critically lauded new film, First Reformed, it might be a good time to discuss one of his earlier efforts, one known to about five people outside of The Criterion Collection enthusiasts and a favorite of yours truly since checking it out on VHS back in the late 1980s.

Are you familiar with Mr. Schrader? For any budding cineaste he’s foundational, one of the 1970s rough and ready bad boys (Scorsese, Altman, Beatty, Coppola, Friedkin, Ashby, et al), making his name (and reputation for unsavory, violent characters and situations) by writing The Yakuza (1974), Obession (1976) and, most memorably, Taxi Driver (1976). He re-teamed with Scorsese a couple years later to bring us the family friendly Raging Bull (1980). During this time, Schrader began directing, some early efforts of note including American Gigolo (1980) and a remake of Cat People (1982).

Ironically, Schrader was raised in a very strict Calvinist Christian Reformed Church household and the story goes that he didn’t see a movie until he was 17. (It seems that, back then, the Calvinist church prohibited going to a movie theater and other “worldly amusements.”) Luckily for us, he fully split from the Calvinist doctrine by the time he headed to UCLA for his MA in film studies. But the baggage of youth has always shaded his artistic choices, his fascination with self-destructive characters and “crime, scuzz and sexual perversions” (as described by David Kamp in his indispensable and hilarious The Film Snob’s Dictionary) a response to formative years spent immersed in (and wanting to shed) a confining religion.

Despite his characters’ often sordid behavior and failings, Schrader is no one-note schlockmeister. He’s first and foremost an intellectual, a filmmaker not only intrigued by how fallible humans navigate their way through a complicated and unforgiving world, but also how some of cinema’s greats evolved their preoccupations and styles. (e.g. He’s the author of, among others, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer.)

Which is all to say that the man who wrote this…

…can also write (with his brother, Leonard) and direct something as artful as Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, which now, after all this preamble, is officially the subject of this blogpost.

Nowhere in Schrader’s oeuvre is his intellectual curiosity more apparent than in this 1985 film, which, due to its subject matter, unique structure and intense stylization, probably only saw the light of day because it was championed (and executive produced) by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas.

The film centers on the life (and death) of Yukio Mishima, famed Japanese writer, physical fitness nut and hardcore nationalist. For those who know nothing of the man (pretty much the entire world outside of Japan and a certain expat I know from college), it seems that Mishima, already a celebrated author (he’d been considered for a Nobel) started becoming more and more disillusioned with Japan’s post-war rebuild into a consumer society, one lacking what he felt was a proper cultural identity. An adherent to the code of the samurai (bushido), Mishima became even more radical when, in 1968, he formed Tatenokai, “a private militia composed primarily of young students who studied martial principles and physical discipline, and swore to protect the Emperor of Japan” according to our friends at the infallible Wikipedia. Things got nuttier still when, on November 25, 1970, Mishima and a couple fellow Tatenokai members attempted to convince a group of soldiers at the Japan Self-Defense Forces to help him stage a coup d’état. When the soldiers basically laughed off the request, Mishima committed ritual seppuku.

As indicated in the title, Schrader’s film is broken into four “chapters,” each framed by a depiction of the failed coup and Mishima’s (Ken Ogata) subsequent death…

Chapter One, interwoven throughout the other three and filmed in B/W, gives the audience glimpses of Mishima’s youth and other key life events that shaped him into the artist and man he was on that fateful November day…

Chapters Two-Four are beautifully stylized mini-dramatizations of three of his novels, all of which provide plenty of additional insight into their author’s MO, including The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which tells the story of a man who burns to the ground a famous Buddhist temple because he’s intimidated by its beauty…

…Kyoko’s House, which portrays a doomed sadomasochistic relationship…

…and, finally, Runaway Horses, which depicts the failed attempt of a group of nationalists to overthrow their government…

This is some avant-garde filmmaking, people.

But Schrader, working with brilliant cinematographer John Bailey, minimalist composer Phillip Glass, production designer Eiko Ishioka (who also did incredible costuming work on Coppola’s Dracula remake some years later) somehow pull it off, every piece of this complicated portrait of a brilliant but disturbed artist coming together for maximum precision and emotional weight.

It really is a sight to behold. And luckily, for all of us, the technology to present such a film in the home has improved exponentially since those dark days of cropped, low-res VHS. As a matter of fact, The Criterion Collection, just this month, released an exquisite Blu-ray of the film and, word is, it’s never looked better. Don’t be so difficult; check it out someday.