A touchstone female revenge drama, Lady Snowblood unspools images that are as evocative as the movie’s title. Indeed, snow is often a blank canvas on which to splash vibrant colors—the purple of a spinning umbrella or, more likely, a crimson geyser spurting from a wound. An adaptation of the Japanese manga of the same name, Lady Snowblood tells the story of Yuki (Meiko Kaji), trained as a child to be an assassin and seek vengeance on the quartet of criminals who—years before Yuki was born—raped her mother and murdered her mother’s husband and young son. It’s not just a sense of familial duty that drives Yuki, however; after giving birth to Yuki and just before dying from complications during the delivery, her mother (Miyoko Akaza) pronounces her an “asura demon”—a wrathful, supernatural being. And so Yuki carries her calling like a curse. This adds existential heft to what is otherwise a dynamic exercise in cinematic style. Under the direction of Toshiya Fujita, Lady Snowblood doesn’t have an uninteresting angle or camera movement. Yuki dispatches one of her mother’s rapists on a rocky seashore at night, where the deep blue sky provides an ominous backdrop. Fujita includes nearly subliminal insert shots of Yuki’s sword, then punctuates the sequence with a dramatic zoom out from the two combatants to an overhead shot of the entire beach. The wider perspective adds a hint of mournful tragedy to an otherwise cathartic moment. The editing does more work in the fight scenes than Kaji, but the haunted stare she gives Yuki emphasizes the idea that she is both killer and victim, perpetuating and caught up in an endless cycle of violence. (Yuki’s fate falls in line with this, as well.) Perhaps influenced by Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s (like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, there is a series of freeze frames introducing the villains, complete with onscreen text stating their names), Lady Snowblood clearly inspired Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films. The main distinction might be that alongside the addictive imagery, Lady Snowblood has a moral curiosity, as well.
(2/16/2023)
