The Lumière Festival Presents A Trio of Stunning Meiko Kaji Movies

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang 30 years after Japanese moviegoers first heard “The Flower of Carnage,” the theme song of Toshio Fujita’s “Lady Snowblood” sung by star Meiko Kaji, it came to mainstream Western audiences via Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill.” Kaji’s sweet, clear voice sings about a “woman who walks at the brink of life and death,” and Uma Thurman slices the top off Lucy Liu’s head, where three decades before, her song had soundtracked another grievously wounded, kimono-ed beauty whose last breath is captured in full-face close-up before she staggers to her knees in the snow.

The trio of Kaji’s films, including “Lady Snowblood,” playing the Lumière Festival this week, invite us to (re)visit this fascinating icon’s work fresh from the source, and find in it a bristling, innovative vitality often absent from the many movies that cite it as an influence.

1973’s “Lady Snowblood” is probably the most “respectable” of the three films featured, with Kaji playing a young woman whose very conception was a calculated act, orchestrated by her mother to bring into the world a child whose sole purpose in life would be implacable revenge on the miscreants who raped her and murdered her husband and son.

Director Fujita was already established in the youth-oriented melodrama genre, so the highly stylized violence of “Snowblood” in which geysers of bright-red blood gush from the most superficial wounds, was a departure, that nonetheless became the work for which he is best-known internationally. “Female Prisoner 701: Scorpion,” by contrast, was the first film from Shunya Ito, and stars Kaji as a woman betrayed by her faithless police detective boyfriend and sent to a women’s prison.