I wanted to explode, light the sky for an instant and disappear.

The Wikipedia page for Yukio Mishima links to the category "Writers who committed suicide," underlining our fasciation with artists who kill themselves and the seeming validity it gives their work. This macabre interest is amplified with Mishima, whose ritualistic suicide was not the result of depression or mental illness but a calculated and, in retrospect, inevitable extension of his art. But while Paul Schrader's Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is structured around Mishima's last day, it avoids the mistake of films like Sylvia and The Hours that depict their subjects' entire lives as a mere foreshadowing of their deaths. Interweaving Mishima's life and work until the two become inseparable, Mishima is a study of one man's obsessive nature that, miraculously, resonates as an exhilarating affirmation of life.

Dividing his film into four chapters, director Paul Schrader (who co-wrote with his brother Leonard) employs a remarkable, ahead-of-its-time structure. Using November 25, 1970 - the day Mishima (Ken Ogata) and five young men from his private army held a Japanese general hostage while the writer addressed the gathered troops before committing seppuku - as its jumping-off point, Mishima cuts between that day, moments from Mishima's past, and scenes from three of his stories. It's an innovative approach, but the most important thing about structure in film isn't innovation but whether the film is organized in a way that allows its characters and ideas room to breathe. In its rigid formal approach, Mishima mirrors the tension between the author's internal and external life, and as the narrative progresses towards the author's ultimate attempt to fuse art and action in death, the film's seemingly separate elements achieve a stunning harmony. By first making us feel the divisions in the author's life - between poetry and physicality, female and male, pen and sword - Schrader's boldly internal approach to Mishima's life illuminates the connections between seemingly disparate elements of the author's sexual ambiguity, radical conservative politics and sadomasochistic impulses. Through Mishima's eyes, we come to see how all of these things spring from the same creative well - Mishima is a tribute to the power of ideas and their various forms.

Schraders also juggles contrasting visual strategies for each section, giving the film an out-of-time feeling that serves its anachronistic subject well. Schrader's worship of Ozu can be felt in the rigid classical compositions of Mishima's stifling childhood; the 1970 scenes have a hand-held immediacy evoke a '60s radicalism that already felt like ancient history in 1985; and the scenes from The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kyoko's House and Runaway Horses couldn't be more contemporary. While Ogata is great as Mishima, the star of the film is production designer Eiko Ishioka, whose bold, expressive use of color and space (remastered and gorgeous on the new Criterion release) makes for a thrilling cinematic realization of Mishima's fantasies. The overt theatricality of these scenes frames the biographical sections as another form of performance, Mishima's obsession with perfecting his body and his life's final act as a transformation of his own life into a work of art (and suggests why, for some smart, socially alienated young males, samurai iconography has the same power as trenchcoats and death metal do for some of their angrier peers). For Schrader, whose filmography is filled with protagonists prone to violent acts as a statement and whose own life has been largely devoting to contriving his own persona, this venture into extremely personal territory results in his best work as a director.

But while Mishima is undoubtedly the work of an auteur, it's also a remarkable collaboration between its creative leads. Ishioka's sets, John Bailey's sharp cinematography, the precise editing by Michael Chandler and Philip Glass' exhilarating score (perhaps his best) result in a cinematic experience that is both intellectually provocative and a sensory delight. To say it's the kind of film they don't make any more would ignore the fact that films like Mishima have always been rare; one of exective producers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola's acts of atonement for their lavish success, it's the rare American film driven entirely by the strength of its ideas. Mishima is the kind of movie you let wash over you, its stunning images proving that, though rare, it is possible for cinema to serve as a marriage of art and action.

Title Card #68

It doesn't hurt to fall off the moon.

Céline and Julie Go Boating is a film you don't watch so much as get lost in. Watching it for the first time, I was quickly overwhelmed - while 3-D and IMAX promise an immersive experience, director Jacques Rivette's three-hour meditation on role-playing, fantasy and storytelling reminds of what truly intereactive cinema feels like. It's a movie that invites you to become its third protagonist, not in a gimmicky sense but through a meaningful and engaging exploration of film's boundless possibilities. Yet for all this, and despite its length and complicated structure, Céline and Julie Go Boating is a breeze - rarely has such a philosophically and formally ambitious film felt so much like playtime.

With its virtuosic opening sequence introducing us to Céline (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) through a very long game of tag, the film announces itself as an elaborate tease. As the bookish Julie and the waifish Céline meet, form a quick bond and are drawn into a completely different movie - a melodrama about a wealthy, mysterious family - Rivette and his actors (who wrote most of the film, with their director as an editor) create a series of puzzles with no definitive solutions. Rivette repeatedly blurs the line between reality and fiction, favoring a loose, informal visual strategy and natural sound. The film is less concerned with either of its narratives than with the act of storytelling - here, a state of hypnosis for a voluntary audience. I wasn't surprised to read that Rivette is a Twin Peaks fan; both directors are preoccupied with the power of imagination, but if the creative process is often dark and unsettling in Lynch's work, for Rivette it is a funhouse of endless possibilities.

The film also repeatedly references Lewis Carroll and other fairy tale tropes, but without the overt symbols of the following year's Black Moon. The magic candy that Céline and Julie ingest to jump between worlds hints at the sexual subtext of children's fantasies, but Rivette sidesteps psychoanalysis in favor of a playful approach that compliments his wide-eyed heroines, who ultiumately stand in for any writer, performer or director (after all, it takes a certain kind of person to play make believe for a living). The film's success hinges on the leads' fearlessly silly performances. Berto, who reminds of a Gallic Shelley Duvall, projects both innocence and an offbeat sex appeal - when Céline takes a shower, Berto's breasts are upstaged by her childlike unselfconsciousness. And Labourier's Julie is a marvelous comic performance, a tightly wound collection of nervous habits and compulsions undone by her new (old?) friend. The bond that the two women form is a return to innocence that, ultimately, arrives at an understated moment of epiphany before doubling back to start a new game.

In both its style and its meaning, Céline and Julie Go Boating is a liberating experience, the kind of movie that expands one's concept of cinema's possibilities. As Céline and Julie return to the movie's central mystery, hoping that maybe this time will be different, Rivette locates the source of cinema's intoxicating power - the promise of seeing through different eyes. When Céline and Julie finally go boating, it becomes clear that Rivette wants to remind us that life is indeed a dream. Maybe so; either way, dreams are rarely as sweet as this.

The Trim Bin #71

- One of the great mysteries of my life is how so many people I know who have otherwise proven their intelligence and good taste count themselves as a fan of The Boondock Saints. Alex Jackson's comprehensive takedown of the Saints pretty well explains my confusion over its hopefully waning popularity - now that we have The Departed, can we retire this piece of crapola as a symbol of Beantown pride?

- I finally saw Iron Man a few weeks ago, about $300 million past the point where a full review seems relevant. To summarize: big thumbs up to Robert Downey Jr., an even bigger thumbs up to Jeff Bridges, awesome robot suit business that puts Transformers to shame, funny, unpretentious, politically muddled and a bit choppy. A good time, and hopefully the sequel will be to the first as Spider-Man 2 is to Spider-Man.

- I'm usually bad at self-promotion, but with the Self-Involvement Blog-a-thon currently underway, it feels like an appropriate time to point out that I was recently the subject of Adam Ross' Friday Screen Test. Thanks, Adam, for your generous introduction - a "wanderer," eh? Interesting...

- Tom Sutpen at If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger... has shared an invaluable resource - the original recordings of the famous Hitchcock/Truffaut interview tapes.

- I don't write about music much because I'm just not good at it, but I have to mention an album I'm currently in love with, M83's Saturdays = Youth. It's must-listening stuff for children of the eighties, using the unmistakable sound of movies and music of the decade not as an homage or parody but to evoke the way that our lives, the songs we hear and the films we see become one in the rear view of memory. It's brainy, catchy and oddly moving - check out the video for "Graveyard Girl."

Title Card #67

Define hoedown.

Last year, an exhibit on marine life at a local museum featured placards informing kids that many of the featured species are nearly extinct; a co-worker's nine-year-old daughter has panic attacks over global warming. It's growing difficult to educate our children about the importance of caring for our enviroment without terrifying them into apathy; one of the many triumphs of WALL-E is how it speaks directly to a child's anxieties about the future, neither patronizing nor indoctrinating its young viewers. A cartoon of surprising sadness and thematic heft, WALL-E is remarkable in the way it gently suggests that the solution to our problems lies in our capacity to love one another. Effortlessly connecting its sweet love story with universal human concerns, WALL-E is, along with movies like AI, Solaris and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, another of this decade's sci-fi masterpieces concerned with finding love in a world transforming before our eyes.

Another of WALL-E's astonishments is the way that it makes Hello Dolly! not only palatable but moving; a jolly number from the musical introduces us to an Earth 700 years in the future that has become an abandoned, trash-strewn wasteland. As humans have abandoned the planet to reside, fat and compacent, in an enormous shopping center, a small robot named WALL-E remains alone, his days spent compacting trash while his nights are devoted to showtunes, bubble wrap and other prized artifacts. It's impossible not to be moved as the little guy makes his way across vast expanses of scorched earth littered with towering trash heaps and plagued by dust storms, all the while whistling a tune. The animators have created a frighteningly believable future that would be the stuff of horror movies were it not for the geniuine, guileless optimism that seems to be an intrinsic part of Pixar's philosophy. When WALL-E's centuries-long isolation is broken by the sudden arrival of search robot EVE - her egg-shape signaling the return of femininity and, more specifically, fertility - his attempts at romance, which remind of Chaplin's Little Tramp in both their hilarity and poignant persistance, suggest that the key to our future lies in holding hands. It's a cute idea, but as WALL-E's thematic implications sink in, it's also surprisingly powerful.

Structured like the Kubrick movies it pays homage to, WALL-E also expands to include sly satire as the robots travel to the spaceship. Writer/director Andrew Staunton gets a lot of laughs in at our complacency and rabid consumerism, as humanity has become a flock of portly, immobile proles. It's unsparing stuff for a kid's movie, stopping short of misanthropy by arguing that most people simply need a little wake-up call. And WALL-E is just that - as Pauline Kael once said about Nashville, it loves us too much to patronize us. In the moral awakening of the ship's captain (Jeff Garlin) lies a powerful reminder of the obvious - Earth is awesome, and worth taking care of. And while I shudder to think of all the Humvee-driving parents who dismissed any questions their kids might have had after the movie, I still love the idea that the seeds of change have been planted in their heads.

But even if you're not a tree-hugging hippy, WALL-E is still worth your time. Staunton and his team of animators balance near-wordless physical comedy worthy of Keaton with a breathtaking vision of the future worthy of Kubrick or early Ridley Scott. WALL-E astounds in moments both grand (WALL-E reaching out to touch phosphorescent blue space debris) and mundane (the robots' shared fascination with the flame from a cigarette lighter). And at the film's heart is a man-made protagonist that, through his selflessness, compassion and bravery, personifies all that is great in us. Sound designer Ben Burtt, who gives WALL-E his voice, did the same for E.T. - like Spielberg's masterpiece, WALL-E finds just the right note of hope at a time when it is most needed. Were it simply funny and brilliantly animated, WALL-E would be another in a string of great Pixar movies; add in its rich ideas and its giant heart, and you have a movie that deserves to be a perennial classic.

Play the Game (7/3/08)

A review of Celine and Julie Go Boating is coming soon - thanks, Paul, for the excuse to visit Pleasant Street Video.

Title Card #66