The Bride wore Yellow

The Magpie deserves her respect, and we deserve to read. A man is quoting a woman writing on a woman viewed by a man, A&P and Q&U, and how!

Below are two film-reviews which short-memoried people forgot and the author herself has no wishes to have them archived somewhere from where one can have a total recall. This is written by la femme enfant terrible and my good old buddy Paramita Brahmachari and published in the Friday etc reviews of The Telegraph, India … (only complain that the review of the second vol. is smaller, hmm … lousy editor’s masculine scissorhands? she was in such a spell of Vol. 1 that she did not like the more classical/Western Vol. 2, I can recall; surely she has other views now). Actually, this blog was being written from such a male POV that I moved to a bit more accommodating pastures, and only one woman who can play a nice foil, a better man to Pierrot Poiccard is Beatrix ‘the Bride’ Kiddo. But she deserves a separate blog and I can’t maintain more! Her place here can be rightly justified, so there they go! Black Mamba and Paramita!

————————————————————

Kill Bill Vol.1
It’s a bloodbath spouted and spattered like watery crimson dye from a toy pistol. An endless chain of ritualized revenges, played out on a Samurai code of honour, and visualized like ballets in ultra-violence. Using b/w, slo-mo, electric reds and blues and chilling Japanese anime. Melding genres in chapters numbered out of sequence, back-and-forthed by Quentin Tarantino like a DJ at a turntable.
The violence that Miramax thought is bound to put off women viewers, does not desensitize like the adolescent video-game-station type peddled in action explosives. Nor is it the art-house aesthetization of increasingly realistic war-epics that hide and naturalize the new pleasures of the information zeitgeist in the name of topicality.
But does it end up using violence perpetrated against women to level out qualifiers like race, class, culture or situation? Or age? Exactly! And that batters home the undeniable fact of its ubiquity. Tarantino refuses to waste time playing the sympathy card to psychologize, but does not purge out the emotional backlash. Thus wryly individuating his Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS) in a way that the playboy pin-up Bond Barbies from Charlie’s Angels; will never be.
If anything, it makes you aware of its exaggerated constructs, the dark machismo of noir— “Do you find me sadistic?” asks Bill of The Bride/Black Mamba (ironic blaxploitation code-name) at her massacred wedding. Her name is bleeped right out of the movie every time it’s uttered. Her methodical dismembering acts with a gleaming phallic sword is pure image too— but not as a black-leathered dominatrix constructed for a lecherous male viewership; nor as a blonde anorexic distaff Bruce Lee. Tarantino’s teenage Lolita in a school-uniform (remembering Britney anyone?) swings a ball with retractable serrated blades on a chain, and stabs a horny bartender asking “…or is it I who has penetrated you?” —So, if you’ve ever idolized Lizzie Borden for getting even with the system, this is also your trip.
The school-dress, by the way, owes it to Kenji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale in which the Japanese government stages a Lord of the Flies like survival-game where teenage delinquents can systematically exterminate each other. For other spectacular cinematic references like how the Battle Royale shootout is itself referenced from QT’s own Reservoir Dogs, and a wicked list of visuals, characters, actors, costumes, proper names, mise-en-scenes and soundtracks that constitute Tarantino’s fantasy kung-fu ghetto, look up the ‘Kill Bill Study Guide’ at HKFlix and Tomohiro Machiyama’s interview with QT at Japattack on the web, we are not even near enough qualified to do that.
All given, you’re welcome to think of Tarantino as unable to outgrow his self-mythologizing “dick drive”. A sick video-store cinephiliac rehashing shaolin, yakuza, kung-fu, blaxploitation and spaghetti western flicks to legitimize and immortalize an entire childhood’s indulgences in grindhouse B-movies. But for something cut-out to infiltrate film school and (Cult)ure studies courses, it is as thoroughly entertaining without the references, which though, once excavated, will set you wildly scavenging for all those forgotten, fossilized or merely underground genres and directors. It’s “Funny. Solemn. Beautiful. Gross”(–QT). Pure pulp. Pure kitsch. Pure camp. Pure visual sin.

—————————————————————-

Kill Bill Vol. 2
“The magpie deserves your respect”—that’s QT, canonizing himself with the last word. And the quotes and salutary nods keep adding up as the narrative cycles of Bill 2 cover successive back-stories, spreading further away from the wedding massacre that is the epicenter, the bloody Rosebud at the heart of this film.
QT’s choice for the meta-genre for Bill 2 is the Western, and the Bride has turned into a walking icon from the oldest of American mythographies. She staggers through Frontier country in a shimmering heat haze, framed inside multiple lens-flares. Her face is caught in extreme close-ups, rucked up, crusty with dirt—more worn than the rugged valleys themselves, like many colossal totemic males before. The soundtrack is likewise a tribute to Ennio Morricone, the composer for Sergio Leone (himself an Italian fabricating faux Westerns)— using his own music along with howling coyotes, whipping wind, chiming chapel bells and the high and dry notes from Bill’s bamboo pipe. The figures are almost metaphoric in significance, fatally resigned to the self-propelling chain of violence. The genre clichés brushing the Noir and the Horror are further immortalized in the visuals— velvety black-and-whites, and tacky rear-projections of a speeding highway behind the Bride (sitting at the wheel quoting the trailer to her own film).
The episode-specials include a Shaolin temple throwback where Uma trains under a ‘white eyebrow monk’ that Tarantino had wanted to play himself (and you’ll actually find Five Fingers of Death listed under his Ten Favorite Films). But otherwise all the violence is strategically hidden. The crimson arterial sprays, kinetic rush and ultra violence of Vol.1 have been traded in for a bigger tease, the verbal face-offs characteristic of Pulp Fiction. The confrontations are delayed and designed precisely to confound your expectations, it takes just under 20 seconds to kill Bill. But that’s because his skinny blonde Samurai avenging angel accomplishes the hardest tasks of all, — killing the Father (and as the result of an earlier lie the Father of the Bride as well). And being born again herself from a shallow grave, just to claim her body back.

Technorati Tags: Kill Bill