Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (1974)

Not rated, but hoooooo-weeeee!  This one is intensely R-rated in my head.  We have a lot of the violence that the first one, but this one has a pretty darned graphic sex scene with nudity.  It also...has nothing to do with the story?  Like, at all.  It's kind of just in there.  Plus, this movie doubles-down on the torture of a character.  While I shouldn't make this a separate category, the violence towards eyeballs is palpable.  It's a lot, guys.

DIRECTOR: Toshiya Fujita

There is a flaw to the out-of-five-star system.  For the most part, I don't use this system, but Letterboxd does.  The flaw of the system is that I instantly compare quality of films to one another.  The long-and-short of it all is that Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance isn't as good as Lady Snowblood, but is still a darned impressive film.

This is a film that suffers the same fate as a lot of these violent swordplay films.  There is always such a quick turnaround between feature films based on how well the first movie did.  The first film is full of story, and it's a story that is personal to the protagonist.  I mean, the first one is a revenge film.  Shy of Yuki running into a super secret second plot that caused her misery throughout her life --which a lesser franchise probably would have done --the revenge story can't be all that personal.  Instead, the world opened up.  Now, considering that this can't be a terribly personal story for Yuki, the story is pretty good.  The problem with that is that, despite the movie being a Lady Snowblood film, Yuki barely plays a part in the story.  She is in the film being wielded as a literal weapon.  She contributes nothing narratively.  There's a moment where the film attempts to make it about Yuki, but it might be the weakest part of the plot.

I hate dancing around things.  I was going to address this later, but since I'm here right now, let's just talk about the thing that bothered me.  Mostly, the story is about the government secret police trying to shut down Ransui Tokunaga, an activist trying to expose the crimes of said government.  For some really dumb reason, they want Yuki to be their spy and discover what Ransui has against them.  The thing is, they don't know this woman.  They know that she's really good at killing and that's about it.  They have her dead-to-rights and they want her to be this nuanced character?  The most obvious thing that would happen is that Yuki would discover that Ransui is a good man who is a fighter or truth and justice.  If you needed a spy to find out what Ransui had on the government, you'd absolutely need a zealot.  It seems like the movie needed an excuse for this to be a Lady Snowblood movie by putting Lady Snowblood in a situation that she normally wouldn't put herself in.  When that plan clearly goes to pot and the secret police just arrest Ransui anyway --which worked, by the way! --they stop really paying attention to their goal of Ransui and devote all of their efforts into finding Yuki, who has almost nothing to do with this story.  Yeah, she killed a bunch of dudes.  But, honestly, the way that these cops are acting, is almost an afterthought.  It seems like the reason that they're after Yuki is because the movie is named after her.  

Okay, that's my gripe.  There may be others as I cross those bridges.  But for right now, that was the thing that bothered me the most.  Oh, and the fact that Yuki just constantly exposes herself to the plague.  Okay, back to griping.  Shusuke does this noble thing for the first time in his life by treating Ransui after he's been injected with plague.  He makes this big point of the fact that no one should be coming close to Ransui and he locks himself in with this guy who has the plague.  Now, Im' not going to be the heartless dude who screams that he should kill Ransui from a distance and burn the body.  I'm not that.  I find that moment quite touching and a moment of major character growth for Shusuke.  But when Ransui dies, putting him in the water source for the town?  Okay.  Fine.  Let's pretend that's not how this works.  He could have just burned the body, but whatever.  The part that really burns me up (no pun intended) is that when Shusuke gets the plague from Ransui, he wants Yuki to help him fight the secret police.  After all that stuff about the fact that Yuki needs to stay away from Ransui, he's very cool with making physical contact with Yuki, who questions whether or not she's a carrier.  But even beyond that, Yuki ends the film handling Shusuke unnecessarily. Okay, now I think the griping is over.

Let's go back into what makes this movie kind of great.  It's my old chestnut: make the movie incredibly political.  The first film is mildly political.  This film?  Full bore let's attack the government and that the police are not your friends.  I do enjoy a good revenge film.  But I also love an "expose the bad cops" film as well.  Boy-oh-boy, does this movie love showing how evil these cops really are.  And it doesn't end with the cops.  The relationship between the police and the higher ups in power is so casually evil that you can just feel the anger behind the camera as this movie was being made.  Part of me is just really tired of watching all of these Zatoichi movies where the bad guys are all gangsters and thugs where it doesn't feel like there's consequences to killing bad guy number three.  Yuki tears these guys apart and I kept thinking, "Geez, I can't believe this movie is going this hard after a shady government."  Instead of any pretense of slow change, represented by Ransui, Yuki just tears these guys up.  It goes so hard that I had to question the final act of the movie.  

This is actually kind of great, especially in the wake of the Epstein files effecting no law enforcement change. The final act has Shusuke and Yuki confronting the government folks, swords drawn.  It's kind of hilariously unbelievable because these guys are brandishing guns as Yuki just takes bullet after bullet while chopping these guys apart.  Okay.  Got it?   Before the fight starts, Shusuke is brandishing all of the evidence of the police corruption over his head.  Shusuke initially was going to use that information as blackmail to get rich.  Not so much now.  Now that he's a changed man, he lets the evidence get swept away in the breeze, treating the letter like the Macguffin that it is.  It just becomes about a bloodbath against the people who are holding power.  Why that one cop doesn't just unload his pistol into them is a mystery, but it still makes a more powerful scene than simply a man infected with plague watching a printer print up evidence.  It's like the movie understands that people don't really care about evidence and it's about action.  Still, I continue to live this nonviolent lifestyle because I want to believe that the world is a better place.  I mean, I'm constantly disappointed. 

Ultimately, there's a kind of gross wish fulfillment thing happening.  As someone who refuses to partake in violence, I watch Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance in the same way that I watch John Wick.   I know what I'm watching is kind of gross.  But also, the notion that problems could potentially disappear given some kind of stabby-stabby superhero is something that my lizard brain finds appealing.  In real life, I would have a hard time defending any of this.  But that's why these kinds of movies exist.