Conflagration

Mizoguchi is a withdrawn young man with a stammer. When his father dies he is sent to a famous temple in Kyoto and trained there as a novice. The gilded pavilion of the temple is for him the equivalent of absolute beauty; seeing it and being there is the one thing holding his life together. Then something happens: he sees the hypocrisy of the head priest, the opening of the temple to tourists after the war unsettles him, and the distance between beauty and the life around him becomes unbearable. One night he burns the pavilion. Kon Ichikawa directs. Raizo Ichikawa plays Mizoguchi. The source is Yukio Mishima's novel. The novel rests on a real event: in 1950 the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto was burned by a young monk, and the case resounded across Japan. The film does not follow Mishima's text closely; Ichikawa largely removes the interior voice and builds the narrative through behaviour. The image is black and white and widescreen; the frames are composed to the architecture of the temple and the space carries the character's state. The subject is the destruction of beauty. The film gives it not as madness but as the end of a chain of reasoning. Raizo Ichikawa was a popular actor then working in samurai films, and this counts as the hardest part of his career. Who it is for: viewers who follow classic Japanese cinema and literary adaptation. Who it is not for: it is heavy, the pace is slow, and the character's interior is deliberately kept closed.