Quentin Tarantino
Kill Bill Vol. 1

Foreword: 'Kill Bill' is a single masterpiece. Tarantino's choice to split it into two volumes is, in my opinion, a blatantly commercial move, which I do not feel inclined to criticize in any way: cutting even the most mundane scenes would be a crime.

The film opens with blackness, but offscreen, you can hear a woman's gasps, of which the cause is impossible to identify. A very first close-up, bloodied and devastated, gives us the answer, and a male voice, offscreen, gives the most hallucinated explanations for so much violence: no, the executioner isn’t sadistic, because in the defeat of that woman he reaches the peak of masochism. And then "bang bang" the sweet disfigured face finds itself with a bullet lodged in the brain.

It is a film about revenge, revenge served cold, but it is also much more. It is the story of a woman, a mother, a killer, who wakes up after 4 years of coma, with a patched-up skull and a womb emptied of the life it harbored.

After this dramatic beginning, the first volume of 'Kill Bill' is violence and art, nothing else. The protagonist warns us from the very start of her mission: don’t be fooled, you won’t find even a crumb of mercy, nor compassion, nor forgiveness, but only iron-clad rationality; no consequence will be disproportionate to the cause, no court could be more balanced in judging guilt, but beware, because human justice, that of the warrior, leaves no room for repentance.

The first volume is dominated by the influence of the Japanese film 'Lady Snowblood', and thus, an anime catapults us from corrupt and prosaic America to the Yakuza, the ruthless Japanese mafia. Young O'Ren, a witness to the brutal murder of her parents, rises, after revenge, to the top of the mafia.

But we soon move on to another vengeance, that of the bride of the massacre at Two Pines. The first of the magnificent poetic moments of the film takes place on the island of Okinawa, where the bride acquires the legendary steel of Hattori Hanzo, but the viewer isn’t allowed to relax for long. It soon resumes with 10 minutes of blood and mutilated bodies, softened only by occasional black and white to catch one's breath; finally, a snowy garden, painted by cleverly designed photography. The bride and O'Ren fight, it’s true, but here violence does not prevail because revenge purifies, and, paced by the slow flow of water, the battle is carried out with martial and directorial elegance in a breathtaking setting.

Tarantino has always been a fanatic of 1960s Japanese samurai films, B-grade splatter movies, and various b-movies, and spaghetti westerns, a mix that doesn’t promise much, and which only a genius could transform into a work like this. The whole is accompanied by a soundtrack that perfectly matches the action, being a constitutive part of it.