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6 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
"Each man kills the thing he loves", 20 September 2008

Author: imogensara_smith from New York City

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

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.

3 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
CONFLAGRATION (Kon Ichikawa, 1958) ***1/2, 3 March 2008

Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

Director Ichikawa passed away in mid-February; having no unwatched films of his in my collection, I decided to pay him tribute with this (which I only recently acquired and was, reportedly, his own personal favorite among his films) and the anti-war drama THE BURMESE HARP (1956; via the Criterion DVD) – both of which are among his most renowned works.

I had attended part of an Ichikawa retrospective at London's National Film Theater in 2002, where I watched eight of his movies – comprising both well-known and more obscure titles; incidentally, I first watched CONFLAGRATION itself in a specialized local theater during a 2005 Japanese-film week – along with Akira Kurosawa's minor SCANDAL (1950). By the way, the lead actor here is also called Ichikawa – and, funnily enough, he plays a character named Mizoguchi (one wonders whether it was a deliberate nod to famed Japanese film-maker Kenji Mizoguchi, who had died two years before and also happens to be the Asian exponent I admire above all myself!); Tatsuya Nakadai, then, provides solid support as an opportunistic cripple – he was a star in the making at this point.

While the subject matter (based on a story by the celebrated but controversial Yukio Mishima) – involving a meek and stuttering monk's schooling and who has an unlimited devotion to a Japanese temple, may not be exactly enticing – there's no denying the emotional power inherent in the unfolding drama, or the beauty of the images themselves (the film was shot in monochrome and widescreen). Besides, the director utilizes a simple and seamless transition between present and past events in the boy's life; incidentally, the story is told in flashback as the young monk is being interrogated by the baffled and angry police for having willfully destroyed a national shrine (he eventually burns down his beloved temple in a symbolic gesture when subjected to the hypocrisies of the world).

Aside from the exploits of rebellious buddy Nakadai, the hero's religious doubt is triggered by the fact that his otherwise firm superior turns out to be a womanizer, and that his outwardly submissive yet overbearing mother is also an adulteress…while in his own eagerness not to have the temple defiled by 'unworthy subjects', he mistreats a local girl who wants to take refuge inside – thus effectively solving her dilemma, since she miscarries the baby due from an illicit affair with a American G.I. (the time in which the narrative is set, presumably, being the immediate post-war era).

3 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
Destruction of Temple of Golden Pavilion, 13 June 2005

Author: holydevil from New Zealand

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The story revolve around a teenage name Mizoguchi, Ever since his father explain the beauty of the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, the surreal ideology of beauty was convey to it. After his father died from Tabeculocus he was then accept by the Monk priest Tayama who was the guardian of the Temple of Gold Pavilion.

When Mizoguchi first saw the golden pavilion, the beauty does not strike him, instead it grow much stronger inside his soul. it was like as if hearing part of the script of melody, the whole ongs will rise naturally. such as the actual image of the golden pavilion one can see the whole temple just by a glips of thought.

The Character Mizoguchi suffers from Stutter, which everyone laugh at him, this sickness makes him feel selfpitty and autism from others, it makes him thinks no one understand his true feeling of how he perceive about life, event or even the temple of golden pavilion.

Until One day he met one of the young monk Tsurukawa, who also are resident in the temple of golden pavilion. Tsurukawa, does not laugh or abuse on Mizoguchi's stutter. Mizoguchi treat him as his only friend who was like the alchemy for him who understand his inner soul.

unfortunately, Tsurukawa suicide year after, as he was suffer from pain of love. This tragic event makes Mizoguchi isolated from others as he reject from realizing the reality of the matter, he now devote his emotion, desire and love towards the unbreakable beauty of Temple OF Golden Pavilion.

after graduate from high school, Father Tayama, offer him to attend nearby college, he met a cripple student named Kashiwagi, due to his crippleness Mizoguchi felt comfortable by being with him. The ability Kashiwagi make beautiful girls fall in love makes mizoguchi self pity.

One day, Kashiwagi introduce girls to mizoguchi, when he starting to have intimate moment with girls, the image of the temple of golden Pavilion appear.

He can no longer taking the concept of image of temple of Golden Pavilion as he realize he have convey the idea of beauty with temple itself, this brainwash ideology makes Mizoguchi frustrated, he decide to burn down the temple of Golden pavilion.this is because the temple of golden pavilion is not mealy an building it has already become his symbol of his life, a reflection of human darkness, an symbol of purity. by burning it down, it symbolize the destruction of human darkness, as it will no longer reflect upon.

In the Mishio's (the original writer) world, he believes, beauty does not exist in eternally, only when something is in a state of sense of destruction, beauty derive within.hence, beauty within our heart and human's existence is limited, therefore, there shall be no reason for an eternal beauty, if eternal beauty do exists, then there should be a questioning with idea of perfect life. like in the movie, when Mizoguchi saw the temple of golden pavilion, he realize his life is no longer perfect, but after he hear the bombing of near by war, he then realize the temple of golden pavilion is fragile as him, that there is chance the temple itself will be burn into flame of war.

In the ancient history,great buildings are not made for human, but for god and for the dead, we can see this ideology from ancient pyramid, Greek god-est palace, if the temple of golden pavilion was not initially belong to the human , then the true meaning of "beauty" is beyond our human expression.

7 out of 33 people found the following review useful:
A movie that should never have been made., 2 November 2003

Author: pmicocci from houston, tx

Until film directors or writers can transmit information telepathically, I believe it's a complete waste of time to try to make a movie based on a novel like Mishima's "Temple of the Golden Pavilion". This movie is basically only a sequence of episodic occurrences without any explanation of the thoughts, feelings, and obsession that drove Mizoguchi to his final, self-destructive act; the novel, on the other hand, is almost completely dominated by such explanation, and the episodes depicted in this film serve in the novel essentially as jumping-off points for Mizoguchi's expostulations on beauty, deformity, isolation, etc. The very essence of his story is exactly what's missing from this film, and its absence renders the movie incomprehensible to those who haven't first read the novel. I watched it within a couple of weeks of having read "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" and so had a good idea of the story; my wife had not read it and found the story frankly puzzling, and I was at a loss as to how to explain to her Mizoguchi's motivations for his actions. The episode of his defacing the scabbard of the naval cadet's scabbard, for example, comes across in the movie as just a peevish act of petty revenge for the other students mocking his stammer. Completely absent from the movie are such central issues as his feelings towards his father and, especially, his mother (including the traumatic experience of witnessing his mother's adultery, which passes almost invisibly in the movie); his feelings towards the Superior and his need to rouse the old man to anger and condemnation; his relationships with Kashiwagi and with Tsurukawa (the latter missing entirely from the movie); and above all, his overarching obsession with the Golden Pavilion itself and all it symbolizes to him. From the movie alone, one gets the impression that the almost completely inarticulate monk just suddenly decides to burn the temple down for virtually no reason, whereas in the novel, he explains frequently and at almost exhausting length what the Golden Pavilion means to him and why he comes to decide that he has to destroy it. Where, for instance, in the movie is even the hint that his obsession with the Golden Pavilion renders him essentially impotent? By his telling in the novel, that is one of the main factors of his desperation. This movie is only a paltry shell of the work on which it was based. If you must watch it, read "Temple of the Golden Pavilion" shortly before you do, or you'll be completely at sea!

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