A young woman, an expert with a samurai sword and a trained assassin, seeks revenge on the men (and one woman) who destroyed her family, leaving her an orphan. When her flashing sword finds an enemy, and it does often, geysers and fountains of blood erupt into the air, artfully staining the protagonist, the snow or the incoming tide. Nothing stands in the way of her ultimate goal, avenging her family. Even when she encounters one of the men, semi-reformed, a drunk and failed gambler, but more importantly, the father of a young woman who resembles our protagonist, she remains unwavering in her commitment to avenge her family.
If this outline is starting to sound familiar, it should. Lady Snowblood, directed in 1973 by Toshiya Fujita for exploitation audiences in Japan, serves as the “inspiration” for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill two-part film. In fact, Tarantino’s film owes a great deal to Lady Snowblood. In addition to the premise, the central character, an assassin motivated by revenge, theme song, over-the-top violence, and snow-bound set pieces, Tarantino also uses Lady Snowblood as the inspiration for a secondary character, Oren Ishii (Lucy Liu), even employing an extended, manga-inspired flashback to explore Oren Ishii’s backstory.
Setting aside the issue of homage, inspiration and whether Tarantino’s film is diminished by its over reliance on elements borrowed from the earlier film, does Lady Snowblood stand on its own? For less discriminating genre fans, the answer is yes, due to Lady Snowblood's exploitation value, Fujita’s occasionally stylish direction, and the connection to Tarantino’s film. For more discriminatory viewers, Lady Snowblood languid pacing, one-dimensional characters, brief action scenes, and predictable plot turns will result in an uneven viewing experience, with interest flagging during a dull middle section.
Lady Snowblood opens inside the first of several flashbacks. The film segues into the first of several flashbacks with a woman giving labor inside a prison camp. The woman’s difficult labor is completed by her first words to her daughter, “You were born to vengeance.” Flashforward twenty years, with a young Japanese woman dressed in a white kimono and umbrella attacking and dispatching a warlord during a snowstorm. The dying man asks his assassin to identify herself. She refuses. His blood becomes mixed in the falling snow. A title card introduces the first of four chapters (an idea also borrowed by Quentin Tarantino), “Vengeance Binds Love and Hate.” Some of the chapter titles are more helpful than others (e.g., “Crying Bamboo Dolls and the Netherworld,” “Umbrellas of Blood, Heart of Strewn Flowers,” and “The House of Joy, the Final Hell”). After twenty years of rigorous, often brutal training by a martial arts teacher, a duty-bound Yuki Kashima (Meiko Kaji) is attempting to fulfill her mother’s mission, to find the three men and one woman who destroyed her family.
Lady Snowblood goes back in time, giving the audience a history lesson: we’re in the late 19th-century, several years after the Meiji Restoration overthrew several centuries of Shogunate rule, and introduced massive social and cultural change. If the voiceover is to be trusted, this period was rife with government corruption and the breakdown of the social order, along with a breakdown in law enforcement. Men traveled from village to village, offering protection from a government-imposed draft. Government agents, rumored to wear western clothes (and favoring white) were seen as threats, to be met and dispatched with force. A schoolteacher, dressed in white, is met on the road to Koichi, a small village. Neither the man, nor his wife, is met with any hospitality. The rest of the flashback leads back to Kashima’s birth in the woman’s prison, and Kashima’s early training.
We’re then taken into the present tense, with Kashima methodically seeking revenge, but finding her task complicated by several events, including the presumed death of one man, an encounter with the daughter of another, and a fateful meeting with a muckraking journalist, Ryurei Ashio (Toshio Kurosawa) interested in turning her life story into a pulpy serial emblematic of his opposition to the government in power (thus raising the interest of the surviving members of the group sought by Kashima). There are, of course, one or two reversals, a brief foray into ill-fated romance, one quiet, almost solemn execution, followed by two longer, more elaborate set pieces, one inside a building reminiscent of the House of Blue Leaves in Kill Bill, Vol. 1, and the final duel with an equally powerful opponent at a masquerade ball.
Contemporary audiences, however, will find the set pieces to be all-too-brief, unimaginatively directed, and, to be frank, crude. Few of Kashima’s opponents can resist her first attack, making their deaths far too easy. The one or two who can parry the first blow don’t last much longer. To be fair, however, audiences in 1973 would have accepted the set pieces as “realistic” (with the exception of the geysers of blood) or believable. Contemporary audiences aren’t likely to be as forgiving. Without set pieces to recommend Lady Snowblood to audiences, Fujita’s film stands or falls on his occasional visual flourishes, intricately tied to the depiction of violence and death, and Meiko Kaji’s performance as the central character. Her intense, convincing performance rises above the material. Sadly, Kishima's career sadly ended with a second and final appearance on film, Lady Snowblood 2: Love Song of Vengeance.
© Mel Valentin, 16th February, 2005
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