an apparently trivial story transcended in a stylish treatment

Rating: 9/10 (11 August 2006)

"One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces" (Pink Floyd, One of These Days, Meddle, 1971).
I have often written in some reviews on this site that I wasn't a big fan of Quentin Tarantino, a cinema-going filmmaker with a mind-boggling culture. It's true that I have never been very taken with "Pulp Fiction" (1994). As for "Kill Bill: Vol. 1", I had deemed it as "violent and hollow". I maintain the first epithet but I jettison the second one now. I watched it again last Saturday night with its other brother "Kill Bill: Vol. 2" (that I hadn't seen before) and I changed my mind about it. I realized that I had overlooked it and I would go as far as saying that I found it much better than Tarantino 1994 film.
The staple story doesn't carry much weight. A wedding in the desert takes a tragic dimension when all the guests are killed except the Bride who spends four years in a coma. When she wakes up, she's got one sole word in her mind: revenge. On a scrap of paper, she noted down the names of the ones who made of her wedding a tragedy and is well determined to kill them all. She also keeps the best for the end: Bill. This story is for Tarantino almost a pretext to beef it up with sources coming from different horizons: comic strip, spaghetti western, samurai film and even video games in the elaboration of the fight sequences. And animated by a cinema passion, the filmmaker couldn't resist to the desire to include film-loving details throughout the Bride's adventures. Thus, the title of the second chapter is entitled if my memory serves me well: "the Bride wore blood". It's of course a hint at François Truffaut's film, "la Mariée Etait en Noir" (1968), a film on which Truffaut himself didn't have a warm spot. I have just mentioned the term chapter since the film and its companion are divided into chapters and Tarantino isn't afraid of subverting storytelling conventions by showcasing chapters in a chronological disorder like his previous efforts.
The technical command of "Kill Bill: Vol 1." leaves speechless. First, I would like to congratulate Tarantino for the cinematography he tapped. It enhances bright colors, especially the red and one thing I noticed: in the first sequence of the film, Uma Thurman drives a vehicle with red seats. In Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot Le Fou" (1965), the red is also a dominating color. In one scene, Jean Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina are in a car with red seats. If I don't understand at all the symbolical function of the red in Godard's highbrow work, in Tarantino's work, his symbolic is blatant according to the story and the Bride's motivations. Red is revenge, violence, death.
This revenge story is filmed with virtuosity to its recesses where nothing is left to chance. It's tempting to deem the introduction of some characters as filler but it's necessary to reveal and consolidate their persona. And throughout these chapters, Tarantino taps all the cinematographic possibilities to bestow and embellish the form to the service of his intentions (to pay homage to the samurai film among others) and the contents. Thus, one of the moments of the film is showcased under the form of a Japanese cartoon film and for perhaps one of the most momentous moments (the scene when the BRie kills some 80 masked enemies, Tarantino borrowed a device from Hitchcock he used in his mind-boggling "Psycho" (1960): to shot an incredibly violent fight sequence in black and white not to show the red blood. Besides and while I'm on this sequence as well as the others that involve fights, they are so well choreographed and set with clockwork precision that they can emulate, even outclass the ones of "the Matrix" saga. And as many film buffs know it, one of Tarantino's recognizable signs is his pronounced taste for bloody violence. For "Kill Bill: Vol. 1", he didn't shelve it but this violence is virtually all blood and thunder and watching ripped or pierced body parts or whole bodies, slashed arms and legs becomes highly great fun. Thrill-seekers will be overjoyed and the height is reached when the Bride before facing Lucy Liu declares to them: "don't try to get back your missing parts!".
Tarantino even grants some importance to some apparently trivial things like for instance the Japanese man who sells to the Bride a clean saber writes on the mist of a window, the one whom the Bride wants to get rid of at the end of her list (you guessed who it is of course) or when the Bride tries to move her big toe after her coma.
It's exciting cinema as one could wish and for Tarantino whose target was partly to pay homage to the samurai movies with which he grew up, he delivered the goods: to spend a truly great cinema moment. The different cinematographic devices and tricks interlock with easiness and fluidity. What about my judgment of the volume 2? The answer in my review about it.
NB: there's perhaps this unlikeliness in Tarantino's scenario. When the Bride gets out of the hospital and finds herself in the underground parking, thirteen hours pass by before she can feel her feet again. But during this time the staff at the hospital must have realized her departure. Why don't they find her again after such a long time? It's a minor detail.