Kinkaku-ji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto, was built in 1397 and treasured as one of the most beautiful buildings in Japan. To a young monk named Goichi Mizoguchi (Raizo Ichikawa) it is a transcendent ideal of beauty; it will never change, he says reverently. "Idiot!" a cynical friend retorts: "People, history and morals all change." In the wake of World War II the Japanese had good reason to know that even buildings are ephemeral. Kyoto was spared from bombing, but in 1950 the Golden Pavilion was burned down by a mentally disturbed young monk. This event inspired a novel by Yukio Mishima, which in turn inspired the film CONFLAGRATION. Both imagine the back story behind this incomprehensible act, but from very different viewpoints.
The film follows the events of the book fairly closely but changes the emphasis, one might even say the point of the story. The Mishima novel is dense with explications of Zen koans and abstruse theories about the meaning of beauty. Director Kon Ichikawa replaces philosophy with psychology and sociology, and shifts the book's elevated tone to one of dark satire, dissecting the protagonist's inferiority complex and the economic and spiritual poverty of postwar Japan. To Ichikawa, the Golden Pavilion was an implicit symbol of the feudal past and "everything which oppressed" Mizoguchi, but his destruction of it is also the ultimate expression of his own self-hatred and sense of unworthiness.
Mizoguchi is tormented by self-doubt, a bad stutter and a vulgar, grasping mother. As a child he witnessed her adulterous affair, and his cuckolded father, attempting to console him, planted in his mind an ideal of pure beauty, the Golden Pavilion. As a novice at the temple, Mizoguchi sees it defiled both by tourists (including an American G.I. who comes with his pregnant Japanese girlfriend) and priests who are money-grubbing and fleshly (the head priest has a geisha mistress) and he becomes obsessed with protecting its sanctity. When he violently bars the pregnant girl from entering, the G.I. is thrilled because she falls downstairs and has a miscarriage, solving his problem. He rewards Mizoguchi with a carton of Chesterfields. Materialism, hypocrisy and nihilism pervade the film. The policemen who interrogate Mizoguchi (forming the framing sequence for a complex flashback narrative) keep talking about whether the temple's destruction will hurt the tourist trade, speculating on how much it will cost to rebuild, and pompously referring to it as a "national treasure."
The well-meaning but weak head priest, who sees Mizoguchi as a possible successor, pays for him to go to college. There he befriends the club-footed Tokari (Tatsuya Nakadai) who is both his opposite and his doppelganger. Embittered and malicious, Tokari is also keenly intelligent and as articulate as Mizoguchi is helplessly mute. Alienated by his deformity, he is a serial seducer of women, manipulatively using his lame leg to gain sympathy. Like Mizoguchi he is the son of a Buddhist priest, but he dismisses temples as "just buildings that escaped the bombing." He cruelly mocks Mizoguchi's naivite and tries to shatter his illusions, but beneath his bravado Tokari is more like his lonely, insecure friend than he can admit. When his second girlfriend, an ikebana (flower-arranging) teacher, insults him as a cripple, his vulnerability is laid bare in his hysterical response. But despite his destructiveness, he can also create beauty: in addition to arranging flowers he plays the shakuhachi (bamboo flute), producing exquisitely pure, otherworldly music. When Mizoguchi finally sets fire to the Golden Pavilion, the film cuts from the massive spectacle of the blaze to a wordless scene of Tokari playing a mournful tune on the flute, as though somehow sensing or participating in the tragedy. The fleeting beauty of the music outlasts the monumental beauty of the temple.
Nakadai, at the start of his career, attacks his role with scene-stealing gusto. He is charismatic, vicious, funny and pathetic, sometimes all at once. Like Lon Chaney he makes his crippled body riveting and its tortured movements perversely vigorous, bringing to life Mishima's description: "His walk was a sort of exaggerated dance, utterly lacking in anything commonplace Physically he was a cripple, yet there was an intrepid beauty about him..." Nakadai's electricity complements Raizo Ichikawa's introverted performance, which creates a painfully convincing portrait of adolescent confusion, desperate because he can't communicate, because (the universal adolescent tragedy) "no one understands." He destroys his ideal, but not before it destroys him.
NOTE: The Golden Pavilion, which burned several times in the course of Japan's violent history, was reconstructed yet again in 1955.
The film follows the events of the book fairly closely but changes the emphasis, one might even say the point of the story. The Mishima novel is dense with explications of Zen koans and abstruse theories about the meaning of beauty. Director Kon Ichikawa replaces philosophy with psychology and sociology, and shifts the book's elevated tone to one of dark satire, dissecting the protagonist's inferiority complex and the economic and spiritual poverty of postwar Japan. To Ichikawa, the Golden Pavilion was an implicit symbol of the feudal past and "everything which oppressed" Mizoguchi, but his destruction of it is also the ultimate expression of his own self-hatred and sense of unworthiness.
Mizoguchi is tormented by self-doubt, a bad stutter and a vulgar, grasping mother. As a child he witnessed her adulterous affair, and his cuckolded father, attempting to console him, planted in his mind an ideal of pure beauty, the Golden Pavilion. As a novice at the temple, Mizoguchi sees it defiled both by tourists (including an American G.I. who comes with his pregnant Japanese girlfriend) and priests who are money-grubbing and fleshly (the head priest has a geisha mistress) and he becomes obsessed with protecting its sanctity. When he violently bars the pregnant girl from entering, the G.I. is thrilled because she falls downstairs and has a miscarriage, solving his problem. He rewards Mizoguchi with a carton of Chesterfields. Materialism, hypocrisy and nihilism pervade the film. The policemen who interrogate Mizoguchi (forming the framing sequence for a complex flashback narrative) keep talking about whether the temple's destruction will hurt the tourist trade, speculating on how much it will cost to rebuild, and pompously referring to it as a "national treasure."
The well-meaning but weak head priest, who sees Mizoguchi as a possible successor, pays for him to go to college. There he befriends the club-footed Tokari (Tatsuya Nakadai) who is both his opposite and his doppelganger. Embittered and malicious, Tokari is also keenly intelligent and as articulate as Mizoguchi is helplessly mute. Alienated by his deformity, he is a serial seducer of women, manipulatively using his lame leg to gain sympathy. Like Mizoguchi he is the son of a Buddhist priest, but he dismisses temples as "just buildings that escaped the bombing." He cruelly mocks Mizoguchi's naivite and tries to shatter his illusions, but beneath his bravado Tokari is more like his lonely, insecure friend than he can admit. When his second girlfriend, an ikebana (flower-arranging) teacher, insults him as a cripple, his vulnerability is laid bare in his hysterical response. But despite his destructiveness, he can also create beauty: in addition to arranging flowers he plays the shakuhachi (bamboo flute), producing exquisitely pure, otherworldly music. When Mizoguchi finally sets fire to the Golden Pavilion, the film cuts from the massive spectacle of the blaze to a wordless scene of Tokari playing a mournful tune on the flute, as though somehow sensing or participating in the tragedy. The fleeting beauty of the music outlasts the monumental beauty of the temple.
Nakadai, at the start of his career, attacks his role with scene-stealing gusto. He is charismatic, vicious, funny and pathetic, sometimes all at once. Like Lon Chaney he makes his crippled body riveting and its tortured movements perversely vigorous, bringing to life Mishima's description: "His walk was a sort of exaggerated dance, utterly lacking in anything commonplace Physically he was a cripple, yet there was an intrepid beauty about him..." Nakadai's electricity complements Raizo Ichikawa's introverted performance, which creates a painfully convincing portrait of adolescent confusion, desperate because he can't communicate, because (the universal adolescent tragedy) "no one understands." He destroys his ideal, but not before it destroys him.
NOTE: The Golden Pavilion, which burned several times in the course of Japan's violent history, was reconstructed yet again in 1955.