The Great Movies III

The screenplay was written by Schrader in collaboration with his brother, Leonard (1943-2oo6), who lived, taught, and married in Japan and also wrote Kiss of the Spider Woman and collaborated with Paul on The Yakuza (1975). The Japanese dialog was co-written by Leonard's wife, Chieko. If you were to stand back and look at the mismatched facts of Mishima's childhood and adult years, and then consider the bewildering profusion of his novels, stories, plays, Noh dramas, public behavior, film acting, and self-promotion, you might despair of assembling it into a coherent screenplay. The unconventional structure of the film might seem to lead to confusion or distraction, but actually it unfolds with perfect clarity, the logic revealing itself.

Schrader, born 1946, is one of the most intelligent and fascinating figures in contemporary film. A key to his work may be his 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, in which he values those directors above all others. It may seem impossible to reconcile their aesthetics with the frequent violence and sex of his work, but at a deeper level few filmmakers are more concerned with the morality of the characters. His films are often about life choices and compulsions and how they work out in real life and have unintended consequences. They spring directly out of his fundamentalist upbringing in Grand Rapids, where he had values so deeply imprinted that they have expressed themselves, however indirectly, ever since. That made him doubly sympathetic to the deep-rooted Catholicism of his lifelong collaborator Scorsese.

I remember a night after the premiere of Mishima, a competitor for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1985. The film was well received, and won an overall award for best artistic contribution (by Ishioka, cinematographer John Bailey, and Philip Glass, for one of his best scores). But Paul knew better than anyone that its chances at the American box office were slim. We met at a backstreet Japanese restaurant, where he observed that his coproducers, Francis Coppola and George Lucas, had raised $1o million "with no hope of getting it back," and indeed the film grossed only about s5oo,ooo in the U.S.

"This may have been my last film,"Schrader said, and that's also something I've heard more than once from Scorsese. It is Schrader's problem, and also his gift, to make films he believes in. Some are deeper, some entertainments, but none are merely jobs of work. He must have found Mishima's headlong dedication to his art a powerful attraction.

he key action in Claude Jutra's Mon OncleAntoine (1971) takes place over a period of twenty-four hours in a Quebec mining town. Although the film begins earlier in the year, everything comes to a focus beginning on the morning of Christmas Eve and closing on the dawn of Christmas. During that time, a young boy has had his life forever changed. This beloved Canadian film is rich in characters, glowing with life in the midst of death.

The town is Black Hawk, surrounded by the slag heaps of asbestos mines. The action is "not so very long ago," the 1940s. The town is poor, and people still live in old-fashioned ways and travel by horse, carriage, or train. The film opens with an argument between a Quebecois mine worker named Joe Paulin (Lionel Villenuve) and his English-speaking boss. We soon understand that Joe hates the "English" and hates the mine, and he quits on the spot, says farewell to his family, shoulders his ax, and heads off to a logging camp where nobody will be on his case. We won't see much of him again until the film's conclusion.

The central story opens with a funeral, and we are given to understand that the deceased died of lung disease, contracted in the mines. The funeral is a sad affair; the dead man's naked body is covered with a rented suit-front, the flowers are all fake, the undertaker takes back the rosary to be used again.

The undertaker is Antoine (Jean Duceppe) and his assistant is a robust man in his thirties named Fernand (Claude Jutra himself). They return after the ceremony to the general store that Antoine owns with his wife, Cecile (Olivette Thibault). Soon we meet Benoit (Jacques Gagnon), the orphaned fourteen-year-old who lives with them, and also the pretty young Carmen (Lyne Champagne), a clerk who boards with them.

This store will be the principal location for the movie, and it is a masterful recreation from the period. Groceries are on the right as you enter, dry goods on the left, hardware upstairs, along with caskets for the undertaking business. The local people all know each other's business and meet here to gossip. On Christmas Eve, there is a festive air. Benoit and Carmen are up early to decorate the window. Benoit's Uncle Antoine is up later, disheveled, and repairs behind the windowpanes of the store office to pour himself a little drink.