Grim Peeper

MOVIES

Stephen Schiff

I've always liked the idea of Paul Schrader: the Calvinist intellectual who never saw a movie until he was eigh teen, the Mark David Chapman-like critic who wrote Taxi Driver as an act of autobiography, the "daring" director drawn to kinky sex and kinky crime. As his new movie, Mishima, demonstrates, the idea of Schrader is far more tantalizing than the real thing. His films promise naughty thrills-they're about gigolos and porno kittens, gangsters and prostitutes. But once the ringmaster has lured us inside, we discover we've been dragged to an auto date. Schrader is the dour Torquemada of the movies, lowering the boom on transgressors, punishing the lustful and the pleasure-seeking in the name of transcendence-and, whenever possible, drawing blood. Schrader's may be the most peculiarly repellent sensibility now at work in the cinema (always excepting Jann Wenner's, of course): everything human is alien to him. True, he packs sex into his films. But it isn't alluring sex— it has no pulse, no heat. Wherever he spies lust without love, Schrader plunges into a vengeful frenzy—"To the rack with them!'' he shrieks, flapping his ebony cape. In American Gigolo, the hero's lubricious life-style gets him thrown in jail, not because he's guilty of any crime, but because he's Guilty, or, as the movie puts it, "guilty as sin." And in Cat People, sex actually kills; worse, it leaves a trail of yucky primeval ooze—take that, infidels.

Yet there is a place for the body in this grim scheme. Flesh is useful because it can be mortified. Of course, the movies have always been in love with masochism—think of Ben-Hur or On the Waterfront, think of Rambo. But Schrader doesn't love it for its looks; he loves it for its mind. To him, self-flagellation is the thinking man's path to redemption. So in The Yakuza, the first picture made from a Schrader screenplay, Robert Mitchum proves his nobility by ceremonially slicing off half his pinkie. And now, in Mishima, Schrader fills the screen with characters who beg their lovers to lacerate them; who pump iron like crazy, the better to pose as Saint Sebastian; and who finally commit joyous seppuku as Philip Glass's score writhes in ecstasy. If it weren't so turgid, Mishima would be a campy howl. (And talk about masochism— Schrader actually filmed the thing in Japanese.)

"I came to Mishima," says Schrader, "because he was the type of character I might have invented if he had not existed." Bom in Tokyo in 1925, Yukio Mishima was a great novelist, and also a terrible actor, a homosexual (as well as a husband and father), a bodybuilder, a film director, a narcissist, something of a sicko, and the leader of his own private right-wing army, which was hell-bent on returning Japan to imperial glory. By the time he seized a Tokyo military garrison in 1970 and committed hara-kiri, he had become perhaps the most famous Japanese cultural figure of the century. Schrader has managed to make him a bore. His film is a sort of cinematic encyclopedia entry; you come away knowing a lot about Mishima without ever feeling you've touched the man, without ever experiencing his life as drama. Afterward, I found myself thinking, Wouldn't that make a great movie?

Mishima is certainly some kind of feat. It's three movies in one, made in three contrasting styles. There's a framing story—a chronicle of the writer's last day—which Schrader has shot using washy color and a jumpy, CostaGavras-like camera. Meanwhile, somber black-and-white flashbacks deliver the biographical details, using a still, tatami-level camera reminiscent of Schrader's idol Yasujiro Ozu. Finally we get vignettes from three Mishima novels, all very stylized and theatrical, filmed in living Schradercolor—which is to say whorehouse reds, chic slate blues, and lurid oranges. The acting in these sequences is noisily Kabuki, and the sets, by the splendidly publicized designer Eiko Ishioka, are at once eye-popping and incongruous—whenever they came on, I felt like ordering the sushi deluxe.

Somewhere amid the mayhem, the fine Japanese actor Ken Ogata can be spotted, laboring mightily to make Mishima seem imposing yet affable. All in vain. Mishima is less an act of biography than of criticism, and Schrader has made his subject safe for general consumption by turning his search for self into ringing abstractions. The cop-out is built into the film's structure. Partly to satisfy Mishima's widow, Schrader has eliminated the more scabrous details of Mishima's life from the biographical sections; the lickerish bits appear only in the scenes from the novels. But isn't that the approach Schrader generally takes anyway? Like the father in Hardcore and the voodoocrossed lovers in Cat People, his heroes can live amid lust and decadence only if they themselves remain pure, virginal, undefiled. For Schrader, Mishima can write about twisted passion, but he mustn't be caught enjoying any.

Paul Schrader is an unlikely moralist. He's not impassioned; he doesn't give off a fervent, righteous glow. I don't think he even believes he's moralizing. More likely he imagines himself following certain lofty literary precedents— Dante and Beatrice in particular—by forging inspirational myths of glorious and transcendent love. Yet behind the artsy flourishes, Schrader's screen voice sounds crabbed, frightened. In his movies, he peeps through keyholes, but he never gets up the nerve to turn the doorknob. As Mishima lumbers wearily to and fro, from the biographical sections to the novel excerpts and back, you can almost hear Paul Schrader whispering in the background: "I can't look. I can't look. O.K., I'll look."