"Kill Bill" is absolutely extraordinary...

Rating: 9/10 (15 June 2007)

"Revenge is a dish best served cold"
Almost everybody knows this proverb. But not necessarily its origin. That's alright, because nobody really knows where that famous phrase comes from. Not even the well-read Quentin Tarantino. In the case where you wouldn't have noticed it, Klingon is the name of a race in "Star Trek". But seriously, do you really think that I'm writing a review to discuss the origins of an expression that every school kid knows?
So, it's supposedly a dish best served cold...
Yet, Tarantino, perhaps unconsciously, strikingly makes that proverb lying. Because revenge in "Kill Bill Vol. 1" is not served cold, but rather dangerously hot, with flavors so explosive that sensitive stomachs will assuredly throw up their dinner.
Even well before he made "Kill Bill", Tarantino was already known for his skillful conjugation of extreme violence and aestheticism. We only have to think of the ear-slicing scene in "Reservoir Dogs" or too-many-scenes-to-give-a-specific-one in "Pulp Fiction". Tarantino completed his violent scenes with numerous references to popular culture in other scenes. Here, Tarantino puts popular culture aside and concentrates almost only on grape juice scenes.
The simple story of revenge is complex nevertheless. Uma Thurman plays 'The Bride'. She is a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, a team of assassins composed of herself and four other members. Their boss is named Bill (David Carradine, whose face is never revealed in this episode).
The Bride seems to have left the organization so she could marry and have a child, but her former colleagues show up at her wedding and kill everybody. They think they've also killed The Bride, but she miraculously survives after being shot in the head, even if her assailants cruelly took her baby off her body.
You would have guessed it, The Bride then wishes to get revenge upon her former colleagues by killing them one by one, and Bill as well, hence the title (surprising, isn't it?). This first episode shows The Bride attacking Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu).
Faithful to himself, Tarantino presents his story in a fragmented way, just like if there was simply no other alternative to his methods.
The Bride quickly liquidates Vernita and we learn at the same time that O-Ren has already been killed. So the rest of the story is presented as a flashback and we know what will be the final result. What we don't know is that Tarantino is about to provide us with a breathtaking show of martial arts fights and extreme violence like nothing ever shown before in the history of cinema.
Tarantino really is a living encyclopedia of violence and ways of presenting it. For almost two full hours, the child prodigy from Knoxville, TN shows an exhibition of violent scenes and practically each one is different from the other ones. With such an amount of violence, naturalism quickly lets devolves into surrealism and, at some moments, shock and disgust become laughter.
Volume 1 is almost completely set in Japan, so it's without any surprise that Tarantino takes benefit of the occasion to pay tribute to Japanese film genres and popular culture. Just by seeing what he had done before with other well-known genres, it's not very surprising that QT concentrates on that kind of genre. I'd even say that it was only a matter of time.
And for a fan of Japanese culture like myself, I had a gorgeous feast. It all begins with the short anime, as surreal in its violence than the rest of the film. A superb homage.
The scenes where The Bride drives her yellow motorcycle towards the streets of Tokyo wearing a yellow suit are an homage to Bruce Lee, but it also strangely reminisces the famous anime feature "Akira". And the suit seems to come from the 'sentai' sub-genre, which gave us the already-forgotten "Power Rangers".
We also have to remember that we cannot dissociate Japan from video games. The spike ball linked to a chain used by the young terror Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama) seems to be a reference to the early titles from the "Sonic the Hedgehog" franchise.
But how could we forget the Japanase sword fights? This amazing spectacle provokes incredibly high thrills during minutes that fly away as fast as the heads of The Bride's victims. Tarantino shot nearly all of the fight scenes in the famous Shaw Bros. studio in Hong Kong and called upon many action choreographers and martial arts specialists to re-create the atmosphere of old Hong Kong movies.
It's true that all of this stuff can shock. Tarantino is aware of it and even takes pleasure from it. How then would you explain the final fight between The Bride and O-Ren? Why would it be shot in a cute and innocent Japanese garden covered with pure white snow? Seeing this natural beauty, we could almost shout out "Sacrilege!" when Tarantino soils the snow with red blood.
But QT is pitiless. He fully trusts his own skills and those of his crew. We have to say that he really is prodigious. He never slows down, even if his last movie has been made in 1997.
For QT, everything in his movies is a question of appearance. It's still true here. Besides the examples already mentioned, we can add the mega-fight that suddenly goes from color to black and white and another one which takes place in a room plunged into darkness except for a blue screen in front of which fighters only look like dancing silhouettes.
With such a beginning, expectations are very high for the following. I must confess that I'm barely able to wait.