Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters transcends all the typical trappings of the often frowned upon biopic genre, to produce a bonafide masterpiece that fully embodies the viewer within the mind of its subject rather than simply hitting the various biographical beats of their life. The film pieces together various stylistically distinct fragments of Yukio Mishima’s life and work. It flows between them throughout, cutting between a more conventionally told biography of his upbringing in black and white, his final day alive as he invaded and attempted to take control of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces in order to reinstate the emperor, and gorgeously stylised and surrealist reenactments of a number of Mishima’s novellas. This, on paper, seemingly muddled and confused structure reveals itself to instead be an incredibly sophisticated and complex attempt by Schrader to synthesise the contradictory life and values of Mishima and reveal a far more coherent and all-encompassing portrait of him. The dramatisations of Mishima’s work are awe-inspiring in both their incredibly stylised poeticism, but also in how they work to uncover Mishima’s inner psyche. In their astute placement between various moments in Mishima’s life, we are able to decipher through his art a far clearer understanding of the real man and his complex relationship to ideas of masculinity, the physical body, his sexuality and nationalist views of Japan. There’s a brief montage near the end of the film which coalesces all these various segments so gorgeously, and is scored by an otherworldly main theme by Phillip Glass, that it truly feels like the most utterly perfect combination of every aspect of filmmaking known to man.