THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
July 20, 2010 – 4:07 am
A yakuza leader in Teruo Ishii’s Grand Guignol movie, Blind Woman’s Curse, is conflicted between taking revenge, obeying her father’s wishes and following her heart but rises to the occasion when a rival wants to take over her territory and when she finds someone stalking her. Stephen Tan reviews.
As a leader of the Tachibana family, Akemi leads a group of her fighters to take on an opposing clan and, in the process, wounds a young girl who was trying to protect her brother. Akemi is later imprisoned but during a quarrel among the inmates, the other women prisoners discover her identity and accept her as their head.
After she is released, Akemi is back running the family. She has also been instructed by her late father to avoid bloodshed and violence. However, rival yakuza chief Dobashi is not so honorable. He wants to control the territory and creates trouble by pitting Aozora and his gang against the Tachibana. But Aozora is no match for Akemi.
In the meantime, Dobashi finds another thorn in his side in Tani, a drifter who can’t stand any form of injustices. However, there is a traitor, Tatsu, in Akemi’s camp and Dobashi receives unexpected help from a mysterious blind swordswoman, Aiko. Soon, Akemi’s members are killed off, one by one, with the tattoos on their backs ripped off. At the same time, the police raid Akemi’s charges in the market for drugs.
Chie, the daughter of shopowner Ojiki, comes across a woman who is slipping drugs into the market square but before the woman can be brought to Akemi, she is killed by Tatsu. Chie is kidnapped and brought to Dobashi, and Ojiki, a leader of the Tachibana clan, is killed by Tatsu and his men. Unbeknownst to him, Aiko helps Tani to rescue Chie.
Aiko’s hunchback servant brings Ojiki’s decapitated head to Akemi, who then leads a core group, including Tani, to confront Dobashi. During the fight, Aiko reveals that Akemi blinded her when she tried to save her brother earlier and she now wants her revenge. Even though Aiko defeats Akemi, she realises that her revenge was a futile effort and decides to spare Akemi’s life.
There cannot be many movies with their own resident tattoo artist but Teruo Ishii’s Blind Woman’s Curse (1970) has Koyo Kawano on hand to lend his artistic expertise. After all, the tattoos are a key feature of this movie - all the members of the Tachibana clan have tattoos etched on their backs but it is Akemi who bears the head of a dragon. One of the film’s jokes is that Kantaro is treated as a “baby” brother as he bears the dragon tail and one of the film’s designs is that when the members of the Tachibana line up side by side, one can see the dragon “form” on their backs. Even with the widescreen, the limited space of the studio does not allow the actors to really show off their tattoos in the action sequence, which the director tries at the beginning of the film and in the closing stages.
A common comment about Blind Woman’s Curse is that there seems to be too many things happening, with the film appearing to go in various directions. For some movies, that may be a relevant complaint but Blind Woman’s Curse is not that kind of film. Apart from its straight-ahead samurai swordfights (the film seems to be set in pre-World War II Japan where one of the characters struts around in a bowler hat), there is a supernatural element (Akemi thinks she is cursed) and one can hardly miss the Grand Guignol in Blind Woman’s Curse.
While not working for Dobashi, the blind Aiko works as a knife thrower in a carnival show that is probably the film’s piece de resistance. A half-nude woman on the roof beckons potential audiences; there is a peddlar frying what looks like pieces of human limbs at the entrance and there are children bundled up in baskets calling out for their parents. Aiko’s hunchback servant does a scamper of a dance on stage but it is the hunchback’s lair, with its models of deformed human heads that provides a nightmarish quality to the film.
Actress Meiko Kaji is stoic and praised as the embattled Akemi but her role is quite limited. Fearful of being cursed (after a black cat had licked the blood off one of her victims), she is conflicted between seeking revenge and following the dictates of her father and, at the same time, she is torn by the feelings she has for vagabond fighter Tani. But time is not spent dwelling on any of these as the film rushes towards its explosive finale.
On the other hand, Shiro Otsuji seems to be enjoying himself as the traitorous Tatsu and veteran actor Toru Abe gets the jeers as the conniving Dobashi. While the film has its share of blood splatter, Blind Woman’s Curse is pretty restrained when it comes to nudity and sex. However, director Teruo Ishii seems to have relaxed his guard when he shows Dobashi’s camp as an opium den where he turns his prostitutes (many of whom are shown topless) into drug addicts. In their drug-addled state, the girls are not only easier to control, they are also able to service more customers. And to take out his anger on Tani and Chie, Dobashi repeatedly dunks them in a water tank.
Ultimately, it is the titular character, Aiko, who has to come to terms with some tragic truth - that circumstances made Akemi her enemy but either one has the heart to kill the other. How she reaches such a decision is not conclusively shown but it is likely viewers will not be bothered either. A tragic ending might have been more satisfying but this is a feel-good movie after all and there is just too much eye candy and enough action to lift any curse off this samurai-yakuza-Grand Guignol mishmash.
Note: The Blind Woman’s Curse DVD (Discotek) is banned in $ingapore.
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