Hold Me, Thrill Me, Rape Me, Revenge Me Part II

Let’s get it out of the way right now: Kill Bill would have little to take to the bank without the 1973 advent of Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood. (Incidentally, Ms. Hannah would be plus an eye in that two-part film if it weren’t for Thriller) Everyone who’s seen it knows it, everyone who will see it will find out, and I’d prefer not to reduce public curiosity about the film to its impact on Mr. Tarantino’s epic genre-spanning homage. I love you, Quentin, really I do, but I’d like to get Oyuki alone for the moment…

The apparently revenge-obsessed manga master Kazuo Koike contributed more to the film world than just the glorious Lone Wolf and Cub opus. Lady Snowblood is another Koike-derived chambara [sword-centric action film, usually a period piece as in this case] about a blade-wielding wanderer who is less a person than a walking act of vengeance. The eponymous Shurayuki was born in a women’s prison – not unfamiliar territory for leading lady Meiko Kaji, scintillating star of the early Female Convict Scorpion entries – to an inmate who threw herself at every man in her path in order to produce a child who would live as the embodiment of her mother’s wrath and murder the criminals who murdered their family.

Shurayuki, which seems to break down roughly to “snow from hell”, (call her “snowblood”, “child of the netherworlds”, or whatever affectionate soubriquet one might choose from the film) was born and so named as her mother Sayo dies during one winter night of the life sentence she serves for taking the life of one of her assailants. She claims to remember everything from the moment she arrived in the world, and those memories include the words carried on Sayo’s dying breath: “…child of vengeance…” Her childhood is spent in brutal training under a stony priest who understands the nature of her evil but unavoidable mission, and in her twentieth year, Yuki goes into the world to carry out her late mother’s undying will. A beautiful woman armed with a lethal sword hidden in the handle of her parasol, she seeks and systematically destroys the gangsters responsible for the decimation of her family.

Unlike the cold quite Cruel Picture, Snowblood is a red hot action flick accented by cool jazz-inspired music (notably the flute-garnished “Shura No Hana”, or “Flower of Carnage”, sung by double threat Kaji and resurrected in Kill Bill) and a vivid color palate that occasionally metamorphoses into a startling multimedia extravaganza. To lay down the foundations of the story, director Fujita crafts dense layers of flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, employing historical still photos in black white and sepia, semitransparent streams of calligraphy, black white and red all over manga (borrowed from Koike and Kazuo Kamimura’s original books), and even a little bit of animation. One standout sequence goes from black and white stills of old Japan to sepia stills of Yuki’s mother seducing one guilty party to a facsimile of stop motion shuffling rapidly through stills depicting Sayo raising her blade then downshifting to streaming full color action of the murder, blazing red arterial spray and all. Mmmm. Arterial spray. “Eye candy” doesn’t begin to cover it. Opening with Sayo’s cellmates in their crimson uniforms helping deliver Yuki within moss-colored prison walls (reminding anyone who’s anyone of Dead Ringers) barely sheltering them from a suddenly sanguine snowstorm and closing with Meiko’s anguished visage drowned in a pool of red ink, Snowblood is a constant joy to look at. The frighteningly beautiful Kaji is perhaps the most compelling spectacle in her occasionally Tim Burtony kimonos, her reptilian gaze turned back on the audience with such intensity that one can scarcely believe she’s an actress playing a role.

However, for all its formal beauty and timeless coolness, Snowblood never settles for making Yuki’s lot in life simply an opportunity to demonstrate her unrivalled badassedness. Her fate is an undeniably horrifying one – she lives only to kill in the name of a family she never knew – but at the same time that her predicament is mindbendingly piteous, one cannot shake the feeling that she is simply not human. According to the story, she is less a person than a fleshly incarnation of a dead woman’s final sentiment, only the continued action of the departed Sayo’s rage at the world. Yuki’s path is a difficult one, fraught with obstacles (will a smitten journalist’s published tribute help her cause or hinder it?) and doubt (are all of her targets even still alive, and if not, how can she justify her continued existence?) heavy enough to extract sympathy from the most callous of witnesses; and yet Kaji’s raw intensity reminds you that her origins make her an organism that is well beyond the average human’s capacity for empathy. (Elite corps centipede, perhaps?) As Christina Lindberg’s beguiling innocence does for Thriller, Meiko Kaji’s preternatural severity forms the real backbone of Lady Snowblood.

I’m sure at this point I hardly need to provide more incentive for the burgeoning genre enthusiast to put Shurayukihime on his or her Christmas list, but who knows…maybe I’ll feel the need to continue singing its inexhaustible volume of praises tomorrow…maybe I’ll feel guilty for not having gone on at greater length about its florid beauty or its bizarre morality…or maybe I’ll relent and start talking about the unseemly Killer Nun instead. We shall see.