Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance (1974)

This sequel to Lady Snowblood: Blizzard from the Netherworld continues where the previous film left off with the title character, also known as Yuki (Meiko Kaji), on the run from the authorities for killing the people responsible for her mother’s suffering. Having been trained from childhood as an assassin solely for this task which has been completed, she no longer has a purpose, something that the screenwriters obviously struggled with. Lady Snowblood: Love Song of Vengeance lacks the focused narrative that drove the previous film so well. As a result, this effort exhibits symptoms of that dreaded disease known as ’sequelitis.’

Surrounded by police, Yuki tosses her sword away and gives herself up to face the gallows. But on her way to meet with destiny, her prison wagon is hijacked by masked men working for a shadowy secret police force run by a pale captain and his political accomplice. They recruit her to spy on an anarchist named Ransui Tokunaga and to steal a document which turns out to have damning evidence implicating the two men in the wrongful execution of more anarchists framed for a bombing. Yuki sides with Ransui and his estranged brother (Yoshio Harada) to see that justice is done.

This outing feels much like a glorified television episode. Now that Meiko’s character is firmly established, she’s simply along for the ride in a story that really doesn’t have much relevance to her. Like the previous film, Yuki’s path of sword-slinging destruction cuts through a setting of political corruption at the end of the Meiji era. But the difference is that there is no emotional stake in the events. A vague reference to a potential romantic link between Yuki and Ransui’s brother is too weak to be of any importance. Yuki is cold as ice throughout the film and even fights with indifference. Her movements are slack and she appears more bored than anything. This is a stylistic approach to the character that works in Blizzard from the Netherworld, but is just a turn off here. The pace of the film is too slow and the events too strung out to allow for for such distance between the lead character and viewers.

Now I really appreciate the fact that director Toshiya Fujita allows fight scenes to unfold in long, rambling takes. Early on, there is a good scene where Yuki casually walks down a wooded path while cutting down thugs who nervously surround her. The camera tracks backwards as Yuki dodges a lunge from behind and strikes in all directions while continuing to look forward. But the problem with this and similar scenes is that they loose a sense of semi-realism that the director seems to be trying to capture as fighters wait to attack one by one and are cut down too easily considering the minimal physical effort that she is putting forth. Later on she is dodging bullets and wrestling with men of larger mass, again with little effort. Even in the suspended reality of a swordplay film, her abilities are not as effectively portrayed as they could have been. The more excessive violence that might have better justified her abilities doesn’t show up until the end. Some gratuitous violence includes a gritty close up of a man’s cheek getting sliced and another man’s arm chopped off in comic fashion. The body count is also quite high, but the way the film is structured, the action is too spread out and this diminishes much of the impact.

Despite some excellent sets, make up, and moments of brutal swordplay, Love Song of Vengeance is inferior to its predecessor. The action is sluggish and Fujita’s direction is not as stylish this time around. There’s one interesting scene containing a montage of black and white stills depicting a violent flashback and a few scenes contain good perspective shots and documentary-style edginess, but that’s about it. The real problem is that the story seems divided in its interests. Lady Snowblood works best when she’s on a nihilistic revenge spree and not signing up as a sympathetic anti-Imperialist fighter which is what this sequel shoots for. The political and revolutionary turmoil of Japan circa 1905 that she’s embroiled in is well-conceived and fascinating on its own, but an exploitive, female killing machine doesn’t fit.