Lady Snowblood (1973)

“An aria of arterial spray, gushing in myriad patterns against a variety of white fabrics. It takes Jean-Luc Godard’s tossed off comment that the blood in Pierrot Le Fou (1965) is “Not blood” but “red” to its logical conclusion, a festival of artfully composed throat-slittings and torso hackings. Blood spits out of human bodies like when Mentos are dropped into a bottle of Diet Coke. It frames killing as pure artifice, executed with impassive grace by the beautiful Meiko Kaji.” — R. Emmet Sweeney

SYNOPSIS

Revenge becomes history written in blood in Toshiya Fujita’s baroquely stylized fusion of chambara action, political allegory, and pop-art spectacle that would become a major influence on Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. Meiko Kaji gives an iconic performance as Yuki Kashima, a woman born for the express purpose of avenging the brutal crimes committed against her family, pursuing the surviving perpetrators across a Japan undergoing the upheavals of rapid modernization. Fujita transforms her quest into something stranger and more formally audacious than a conventional revenge thriller, moving freely between jagged handheld camerawork and exquisitely composed tableaux, wintry natural landscapes and theatrical interiors, subjective memories and densely layered flashbacks. The resulting collision of styles mirrors a society caught between its feudal inheritance and an uncertain modern future, entwining Yuki’s private vendetta with larger currents of political violence and historical change. At once icily controlled and extravagantly bloody, Lady Snowblood turns revenge into a haunting cycle in which personal memory and national history prove impossible to disentangle.