Japan, 1974,
color, 89’.
SCENARIO: Kamimura & Koike Kazuo, Ohara Kiyohide, Osada Norio Yoshio,
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Suzuki Tatsuo;
EDITING: Inoue Osami,
MUSIC: Hirose Kenjiro.
CAST: Kaiji Meiko, Harada Yoshio, Itami Juzo, Shin Kishida, YUoshi Yuki.
In Japanese with English subtitles.
Kurosawa had us accostumed to Samurai films. However, his heroes were male warriors, while Fujita’s protagonist is a woman. That she is also young, beautiful and powerful adds even more interest. The fact that this film was produced in 1974 and transferred to NTSC video in 1998, shows that the genre is “in”. One would immediately think of the recent success of another Asian film, with a heroine also very quick and infallible with her sword, the protagonist of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Ang Lee. Besides the Samurai aspect, this film has a dimension that other features of the same kind do not have, not even the first one of the series by the same Fujita. In Lady Snowblood (1), made one year earlier, the story is very similar to a traditional samurai plot, or, for that matter, western cowboy genre plot: offense, humiliation, shame, calling for a bloody revenge. Are we witnessing here the birth of an “anarchist samurai saga”? Too early to tell (unless there have been Lady Snowblood 3 and more , or copycat similar films).
The Japanese cinema tradition was never attracted to anarchism. Upon attending the First International Tokyo Film Festival, in 1985, I researched the topic with film critics and historians of anarchism: not a single title was mentioned, so, the journal Le Libertaire (Tokyo, Oct. 1985) published my study “Anarchists in Films” without a single Japanese title. If not even the Fujita film was included it was certainly due to the fact that no one looked into that genre.
Now, let’s analyze the plot of Lady Snowblood 2 . The heroine is surrounded and captured after an arduous fight with the police. She is then condemned to death and while being brought to the gallows she is freed by an unknown saver. An unlikely ally, since he is the chief of secret police. His intentions are quickly revealed: in exchange for her liberty she has to penetrate the home of a dangerous anarchist and discover a secret document.
Is Tokunaga Ransu a pseudonym for a known historical anarchist (for example Osugi Sakae) or is it an imaginary story? The plot develops during the last year of the Meiji Empire in Japan, when the so called “anarchist japanese martyrs” are hung by the government as allegedly responsible for a conspiration against the Emperor. So either Fujita (or the authors of the script) is inspired by real-life events (and in this case he espouses the anarchist thesis of the occurrence) or he (they) embellishes history, mixing it with fiction. In either case, the result is highly positive: the main male character is a true anarchist (with a big Bakunin portrait in his studio), idealist, brave (he resists torture beyond any conceivable limit and he is injected with bubonic plague -–a dirty trick that not even our western government have concocted, so far) to have him dying in pain and alone.
But his sacrifice is not “in vain”: the “thing” Lady Snowblood was supposed to find was not a bomb, but a private document of the secret police, proof of the previous machinations about the anarchists. Lady Snowblood is no longer seeking “revenge”, but “justice”, and she ends up having both, by being converted to the right side.
Pietro Ferrua