While many bio-flicks chronicle a person's life from time A to time B, Mishima shows a portrait of this man through his created fictional works, but within a nonfiction framework. The nonfiction (or at least, 'based on true events') section bookends the film by opening on the morning of Mishima's last day and ending with Mishima taking hostage a commandant of the East Command of Japan's Self-Defense Forces, making an impassioned speech to his fellow countrymen on the importance of tradition and values, and then promptly committing seppuku (ritualistic suicide of ancient Japanese samurai). Mishima's last day and suicide are no secret, but his motivations are elusive. To understand the man behind the actions, director Paul Schrader adapts three of Mishima's novels into vignettes to explain Mishima's major idealogical milestones. The contemporary actions of his final day shot in color are contrasted by the stark black and white flashbacks. Working in tandem with the flashbacks of Mishima's youth, the adaptations of his work are an explosion of otherworldly color, staging, and extreme characters who live and die by their convictions. Though unconventional is an understatement, director Paul Schrader's interpretation of Mishima's life and work implies that an artist's creations are an expression of the person and, in effect, part of that person.
To bridge the gap, both stylistically and thematically, between Mishima's fiction and his life, Schrader shows how ideas in his novels play a part in his life. At one point during the 'Kyoko's House' chapter, the lover fixated on the flesh explains his desire to start bodybuilding and improving on his own natural beauty. When Schrader flashes back to Mishima, he's in the midst of his vigorous weightlifting routine (Mishima adhered to a strict three-days-a-week schedule in his quest to beautify his body). We don't need to know Mishima's motivation for exercising in his daily life because, by paralleling the novel-adapted vignettes to the Mishima flashbacks, Schrader imposes the ideals of Mishima's characters back onto the artist himself. Putting an emphasis on the adapted film vignettes of Mishima's writings helps us understand what Mishima believed in (through his characters). So when the same technique is applied during Mishima's suicide, we understand his motivations. It's not that a sequential series of events leads Mishima to his self-inflicted end, but a series of developing ideas that Schrader shows us through Mishima's own works. We know his spiritual self and in that way, we sympathize with his cause and his sacrifice.
But exploring Mishima's ideals through exploited film techniques comes at a cost. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is an extensive and successful look at Mishima's ideals, but not Mishima, the man. Instead of his shortcomings and flaws making him more human, they are glorified as the consequences of an idealist. His smaller stature prior to weightlifting, for example, didn't inhibit him, it motivated. In the club scene, we see how a comment about his puny physique hurts him, but what we understand is how that motivated him to manifest his ideas of beauty within his own physical body by starting an exercise regime -- a simplistic and borderline cinematic cliché -- cue the training montage (don't worry, there isn't one).
Perhaps this over-glorification is felt most in the final scene during Mishima's death. His failure to motivate his countrymen, who boo him during his impassioned final speech, punctuates the perfect conclusion to his traditional, samurai-influenced beliefs and his seppuku. But the disappointment that he might have felt in his failure is absent, as is the emptiness as a metaphorical ronin samurai that presumably motivates the seppuku. It is in this single moment when Schrader could let his focus on ideals slip to Mishima the man; while doing so might have opened the film up to more criticism, not doing so leaves us empty. In those moments of failure and death, the ones so romanticized by Mishima himself (see Patriotism), there is no hint of Mishima's humanity -- only his unflinching ideals. And though he goes through with it, we expect no less from him, but still wonder if there wasn't a moment of doubt, of regret. For the viewer perplexed by his resolve, we are full of doubt and regret that an impassioned man met such an early end.
