Quentin Tarantino, “Kill Bill: Volume 1” (2003)
Inspired by and paying homage to grindhouse cinema and the film genres that dominate it – cheap ‘n’ cheerful Asian martial arts movies, samurai flicks, blaxploitation and spaghetti / paella Westerns – the two “Kill Bill” films revolve around a lone avenger, known as The Bride, who seeks retribution against those who tried to destroy her and her future as a wife and mother. Implicit in this theme is the notion that past and present actions have future consequences, even years down the track when people’s attitudes and lives change and they may no longer believe in what they used to do.
The original “Kill Bill” film turned out to be about four hours long so it was split into two parts for cinematic release and the two parts have now become independent films in their own right. The otherwise straightforward revenge plot is chopped up into chapters that jump backwards then forwards and back in time but they are not difficult to follow and provide viewers with background information at the appropriate time so that later developments can make sense without viewers having to remember what happened earlier that is significant to the future action. In “… Volume 1”, The Bride (Uma Thurman), at this stage not named, despatches in brutal fashion Vernita Green (Vivica A Fox) after a knife fight in Green’s own home. Green’s daughter witnesses her mother’s death and The Bride acknowledges that the child may seek her own revenge against her years later. The film then jumps back to a point in time when The Bride is about to marry her groom at a chapel in El Paso. The wedding party is attacked by her former colleagues in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. After telling the Squad leader Bill (David Carradine) that she is pregnant with his baby, The Bride is shot in the head and left for dead. She miraculously survives but lies unconscious for four years in hospital, during which time a hospital orderly has been selling her body to his buddies. One of her colleagues, Elle Driver (Darryl Hannah) tries to kill her but is stopped by Bill who considers Driver’s action to get rid of The Bride while she is unconscious and defenceless unworthy of the squad.
The Bride revives and kills the hospital orderly and one of his pals mercilessly. Escaping from the hospital with the orderly’s car keys, she commandeers his van and while she teaches herself to walk and fight again, and makes plans to eliminate the people who tried to kill her earlier, viewers are treated to a partly animated interlude about one of those people, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), her background as an orphan losing her parents to Japanese yakuza, her later training to be an elite assassin and her current position as head of the yakuza underworld. The rest of the film follows The Bride to Okinawa where she commissions a sword to be made by Hattori Honzo (Sonny Chiba), a former master swordsmith now working as a sushi chef, and then seeks out O-Ren Ishii at a restaurant, The House of Blue Leaves, where she fights off Ishii’s squad of fighters, the Crazy 88, and Ishii’s improbably schoolgirl bodyguard Gogo Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama). The two women later face off against each other in a snow-covered garden.
The thin plot is well structured though perhaps some sequences are a little too long and could have been edited for length. The animated interlude enables the violence and an act of paedophilia to be viewed from a distance, and probably helped the film gain a rating that allowed it to be viewed by a mainstream adult audience (as did filming the scenes where The Bride fights the Crazy 88 in black-and-white). Cinematography and the use of split screens – I actually think the split-screen filming technique to tell part of the story could have been used more – are very effective and help to give the film a distinct appearance and style. The sadism, while intended as cartoonish, can appear brutal and excessive to audiences unfamiliar with low budget slasher and porn films. Aliens from outer space viewing films like this might conclude that Western civilisation is brutal, exploitative, seedy and sordid, not realising that such a world is part of the grindhouse movie phenomenon.
The acting may not be great and fight sequences are ridiculous but those are expected in a grindhouse homage of the nature of the “Kill Bill” films. Ultimately the two Tarantino films are no more than what Tarantino set out to do. Perhaps the most significant part of “Kill Bill: Volume 1” is the fight between Vernita Green and The Bride, and what the characters themselves could have represented in that scene. Green actually manages to get what she and the rest of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad denied to The Bride: marriage, a daughter and a nice suburban life in a Californian city. The fight might have had more poignancy if The Bride had expressed some jealousy in a voice-over at what Green enjoys, and if the conversation the two have before The Bride knifes her had included something from Green about her life in the suburbs, how good it is or isn’t, and how she might be missing (or not) her former life.