Lady Snowblood
I happened upon Lady Snowblood (1973) two nights ago while channel surfing. It was just starting on Turner Classic Movies. I didn't intend at first to watch it, but the striking beginning, featuring a breech birth by a dying young woman in prison, held my attention long enough to make me want to see the film unfold. Snow falling beyond vertical slats in the prison wall turns red, expressionistically, after the mother dies. Before her final breaths, she says to her newborn daughter, "You will carry out my vendetta. You are an asura, a demon!"
A mother calling her newborn a demon was enough to make me commit to watching a movie that started at 1:30 AM.
Directed by Toshiya Fujita, Lady Snowblood is enough like Quentin Tarantino's two Kill Bill movies to make me conclude that the tribute-practicing American based his revenge duology starring Uma Thurman on the earlier Japanese film.
Yuki (Meiko Kaji), the "demon," who grows up trained by a master, learning fighting techniques and a nearly superhuman toughness, has a deceiving appearance: a placid look like a pretty doll, until she unveils her rage. She becomes then a truly scary avenger, making her enemies (the three men who raped her mother and murdered her father in league with an additional woman) quail when they realize, one by one, who she is.
Doomed by her mother's wish for revenge, Yuki has no life of her own. The first time we see her as a twenty year old adult, she encounters one of her targets on a road. He's accompanied by several bodyguards. Drawing her sword from an umbrella (an ordinary object becoming increasingly sinister as the movie progresses) she bloodily dispatches the guards, red liquid spraying everywhere. Her target, after Yuki reveals her identity, then gets the blade in his heart, one down three to go.
In Tarantino's Kill Bill films, Thurman's character, the Bride, also armed with a kitana, tracks down and confronts, one by one, the killers who murdered the guests and her betrothed at her wedding. An identical sort of bloody countdown occurs in Lady Snowblood, each lead-up to an encounter separated as a numbered chapter with a title.
Yuki's targets (I hesitate to call victimizers victims) range from a now hopeless gambling drunkard, to a woman who controls a police department with her wealth, to a powerful and rich arms dealer making piles of yen off of nation state preparations for the upcoming First World War. None of her targets are good people, yet the gambling drunkard has a daughter, innocent in knowledge of her father's criminal past. The potential for the cycle of revenge to keep revolving is always present around Yuki's activities.
I won't reveal what finally happens--there are twists and turns in the film. I will say that the cinematography is gorgeous, the colors as vivid as those in Impressionist paintings. Creative camera techniques used at key moments, such as during fight scenes and especially in a confrontation on a rocky beach, add jarring and exciting shifts to the film's pace, which alternates a slow even flow with the quickness of the violence.
It's the kind of film that critics dismissive of "genre" cinema, as supposedly being inferior to "serious" movies, might overlook, missing the power resonating not only from the story but from the performances, direction, imagery, editing, and music. Like Once Upon a Time in the West, another great revenge story, Lady Snowblood is a beautiful movie, not just in its look, but in the emotions it summons from the viewer. The ending with its final shot really got to me.
Vic Neptune
I happened upon Lady Snowblood (1973) two nights ago while channel surfing. It was just starting on Turner Classic Movies. I didn't intend at first to watch it, but the striking beginning, featuring a breech birth by a dying young woman in prison, held my attention long enough to make me want to see the film unfold. Snow falling beyond vertical slats in the prison wall turns red, expressionistically, after the mother dies. Before her final breaths, she says to her newborn daughter, "You will carry out my vendetta. You are an asura, a demon!"
A mother calling her newborn a demon was enough to make me commit to watching a movie that started at 1:30 AM.
Directed by Toshiya Fujita, Lady Snowblood is enough like Quentin Tarantino's two Kill Bill movies to make me conclude that the tribute-practicing American based his revenge duology starring Uma Thurman on the earlier Japanese film.
Yuki (Meiko Kaji), the "demon," who grows up trained by a master, learning fighting techniques and a nearly superhuman toughness, has a deceiving appearance: a placid look like a pretty doll, until she unveils her rage. She becomes then a truly scary avenger, making her enemies (the three men who raped her mother and murdered her father in league with an additional woman) quail when they realize, one by one, who she is.
Doomed by her mother's wish for revenge, Yuki has no life of her own. The first time we see her as a twenty year old adult, she encounters one of her targets on a road. He's accompanied by several bodyguards. Drawing her sword from an umbrella (an ordinary object becoming increasingly sinister as the movie progresses) she bloodily dispatches the guards, red liquid spraying everywhere. Her target, after Yuki reveals her identity, then gets the blade in his heart, one down three to go.
In Tarantino's Kill Bill films, Thurman's character, the Bride, also armed with a kitana, tracks down and confronts, one by one, the killers who murdered the guests and her betrothed at her wedding. An identical sort of bloody countdown occurs in Lady Snowblood, each lead-up to an encounter separated as a numbered chapter with a title.
Yuki's targets (I hesitate to call victimizers victims) range from a now hopeless gambling drunkard, to a woman who controls a police department with her wealth, to a powerful and rich arms dealer making piles of yen off of nation state preparations for the upcoming First World War. None of her targets are good people, yet the gambling drunkard has a daughter, innocent in knowledge of her father's criminal past. The potential for the cycle of revenge to keep revolving is always present around Yuki's activities.
I won't reveal what finally happens--there are twists and turns in the film. I will say that the cinematography is gorgeous, the colors as vivid as those in Impressionist paintings. Creative camera techniques used at key moments, such as during fight scenes and especially in a confrontation on a rocky beach, add jarring and exciting shifts to the film's pace, which alternates a slow even flow with the quickness of the violence.
It's the kind of film that critics dismissive of "genre" cinema, as supposedly being inferior to "serious" movies, might overlook, missing the power resonating not only from the story but from the performances, direction, imagery, editing, and music. Like Once Upon a Time in the West, another great revenge story, Lady Snowblood is a beautiful movie, not just in its look, but in the emotions it summons from the viewer. The ending with its final shot really got to me.
Vic Neptune
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