Lady Snowblood (1973)

​Not rated, which is its own kind of insane.  Like, this movie is the template for Kill Bill, questionable content and all.  I've now watched a lot of jidai-geki / samurai-era films.  There's a lot of Japanese swordplay.  There's bloodless violent.  There's bloody violence.  And then there's insane amounts of blood, similar to Lone Wolf and Cub.  This is Lone Wolf and Cub over-the-top bloody violence.  This is the blood that sprays everywhere, regardless of where someone is injured.  Also, the bigger problem is the rape and the child nudity, which avoids genitals but is still really icky.  Not rated, but definitely problematic. 

DIRECTOR: Toshiya Fujita

Happy New Year, everybody!  My smug rear end didn't pick up any resolutions this year because I'm already doing too much.  Maybe that's a New Year's resolution in itself: self-care.  Regardless, here I am, writing yet another blog.  I'm mildly excited about this one because Lady Snowblood is something special.  I am pretty darned sure that I've seen this one before.  Like, 90%.  I've seen Sympathy for Lady Vengeance for sure.  But I also think that I've seen Lady Snowblood because of the direct ties to Quentin Tarantino.  Like, all of Kill Bill owes a heavy debt to Lady Snowblood.  

I had the opportunity to see Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. And then Quentin Tarantino couldn't keep his stupid mouth shut about Paul Dano and it reminded me that Tarantino kind of sucks as a human being.  He's a guy who is weirdly cool with Roman Polanski's past.   I always loved Kill Bill.  I know.  It's a yellow-flag to have that as a favorite movie.  But there's something always fascinating about revenge films. I don't know what it is.  Maybe there's something sadistically satisfying about watching revenge flicks.  It's the kind of thing that, if I encountered in real life, I would shy away from it.  But maybe no one knows how to make a revenge story like the Japanese.  (That sounds inappropriate, but I'm going to stick by it because I quasi-believe it.  You can talk me out of things like this pretty easily, so feel free to chime in.) 

I want to talk about the only negative thing about the movie first because it contextualizes a lot of my thoughts on the great things in the movie.  While completely iconic as Yuki / Lady Snowblood, Meiko Kaji is a little bit of a buy-in for me.  I've now watched a lot of pretty incredible swordplay in all of my silly box sets.  (I keep asking for Criterion box sets for special occasions and the cooler ones tend to be samurai films.  It has made me accidentally a low-key expert on samurai films.) For stills, Kaji is perfect.  But the second she has to move, I really have to turn the imagination on to think that she's this killer, cold assassin.  It's just that the story asks so much from her.  She's imbued with a demonic origin story, implying that, like Frank Castle, she is a storm of fury that cannot be slowed down regardless of what challenges await her.  Now, the story confirms this attitude.  Yuki shows up somewhere.  For sure, everyone is going to die.  But most of the action sequences convey violence by the camerawork, not by insane footwork.  Honestly, she looks the most uncomfortable when she's brandishing a sword.  

But that's really it.  If you do that buy-in for the movie, it really works.  The thing about Meiko Kaji is that she doesn't really have a ton to do, despite being the protagonist of the film.  If anything makes the movie really thrive, it's the piece as a whole.  I want so desperately to say "setting", but that's really not accurate.  If anything, this is a movie that doesn't mind being its own thing.  Golly, it takes some big swings.  The first few minutes, I thought that this was going to be a rougher film.  I mean, again, I know about Lady Snowblood.  I know its whole rep.  Again, very good chance that I've seen this movie.  (Some people are out there wondering why I can't remember if I've seen a movie before.  I watch a lot of movies, guys.)   But between the disjointed narration, the incredible style of the film, and the intense storyline that gets incredibly meta, Lady Snowblood is way more than simply a traditional samurai revenge film.  I mean...she's not even a samurai, guys.

Before I get too lost, I want to bring my thesis to the table.  Once in a blue moon, I'll come up with a great idea for a critical response essay.  I'm telegraphing the fact that I had this thought while writing because I need to do way more research before I would ever present this to an academic environment.  That being said, I do want to stress my paper about gender and ableism, using Lady Snowblood as my foundational text.  My argument is that Lady Snowblood treats womanhood as a disability.  I'm juxtaposing Zatoichi as my counterargument.  The thing that kept all of the Zatoichi movies going was the notion that blind swordsman Zatoichi went from town-to-town and people underestimated him, leading to their inevitable downfall.  No one believed that a blind swordsman could take down a gang of thugs.  Still, movie after movie, he would swing his sword around and they'd all fall to the ground, bloodied by his cane sword.  Same premise exists in Lady Snowblood.  The umbrella sword she carries as a stand-in for the cane sword is fun.  But the real comparison is that Yuki gets incredibly close to these people that she ends up killing because people assume that a woman can't possibly hold her own against a gang of thugs.  Heck, the entire movie is almost reaffirming that notion.  After all, Yuki's origin lies in the fact that these four rape a woman for four days.  I am not trying to dismiss the grossness of the act, but I can't help but make the comparison to Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor in Terminator 2.  It's the trauma that she experiences in her origin story that causes her to dehumanize herself, creating the ultimate soldier in her wake.

Now, I've never read the manga.  As comic book literate as I am, it's always been Western comics.  I've kinda/sorta dabbled in bains dessinee because I've been to France.  Here's the thing, what I love as a Westerner who has limited experience with Lady Snowblood as a concept finds the story of Lady Snowblood fascinating.  I imagine that if you were from Japan, you are probably mad that this is only an hour-and-a-half movie and she murders all four of her targets.  After all, Kill Bill takes two films do do the same thing.  In my head, the manga takes a long time for each target to be hunted down and its probably incredibly ornate.  While that might be cool, I like how the movie handles the meta narrative of it all.  I'm talking about Ryu adopting the pen name of Kazuo Koike and becoming the creator of the Lady Snowblood manga in universe. Golly, that is a cool bit of fun.  I like when a fourth wall is broken well.  With a movie like Lady Snowblood, it helps me as a Westerner get a little bit more context for the film as a whole.  Like, in universe, Yuki can't walk around because people know of her story.  Somehow, even beyond all that, we get more insight into the vague politics of the era, having the police under the thumb of the evil Okono Kitahama.

There was a moment that I thought that the movie was going to commit a crime.  It was insane that this movie tried to have Yuki hunt down four of her killers.  When movies like this present such a large premise, very much like The Count of Monte Cristo, I have to wonder what would happen if a target died of natural causes.  And for a hot second, I almost believed that this movie would have answered that question.  And, for that second, I thought the answer was: nothing.  There's nothing you can do if someone dies of natural causes.  I mean, thank goodness that's not how the story ended.  As melodramatic as it was, having a big boss who impliments disguses (I mean! That was an incredibly effective face mask for 1973) as a guy who returns from the dead?!  It did the exact thing that the movie needed to do.

AND THEN!  AND THEN!  Having Yuki deal with the consequences of killing the most pathetic of the group by getting stabbed by the daughter?  Chef's kiss, guys!  Chef's kiss!  I love that the movie doesn't let Yuki get away with anything.  It is a world that has too much blood, but just the right amount of real world consequences. 

​I love this kind of stuff, guys.  I really do.