Kill Bill: Vol. 1

A film built on revenge, and the first half of a narrative cut in two. A woman is lying shot in a chapel. It was her own wedding rehearsal; her old crew came and killed everyone. Four years later she wakes from a coma. She makes a list in a hospital bed and starts working through it. From there the film does not run in order. It is divided into numbered chapters and the sequence is deliberately shuffled. The first target is in a suburban house, in a kitchen. The second chapter takes place entirely in Tokyo. What the narrative is interested in is not revenge but form: the film is assembled from Japanese swordplay cinema, Italian westerns, Hong Kong fight films and 1970s television, and does not hide it. O-Ren Ishii's past is told as an animated sequence, made at a Japanese animation studio, and the harshest violence in the film is there. The section where the sword is made is a tribute. The actor playing the swordsmith is a well-known figure in Japanese action cinema and the character is given his own name. The final fight takes place in a tea house against eighty people. Part of the sequence was turned to black and white, not for aesthetic reasons but to avoid a rating problem caused by the amount of blood. It was shot as a single film. The distributor wanted it split because it ran past four hours, and the narrative was cut in the middle. The main character's name is spoken several times and bleeped each time; it is given in the second film. Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, Sonny Chiba and David Carradine are in the cast. Quentin Tarantino wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes genre cinema and stylised violence. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a story; the film is a presentation on purpose and does not finish by itself.