Complete Red Peony cycle

Following the success of the Daiei company’s Woman Gambler saga, with Kyoko Enami, the Toei company was compelled to come up with a worthy rival. The answer would be Oryū, The Red Peony, producer Shigeru Okada entrusting the writing to the great screenwriter and director Norifumi Suzuki, the future creator of School of the Holy Beast (1974). Until then confined to supporting roles, Sumiko Fuji, daughter of Toei producer Kōji Shundō, was chosen to play Oryū in seven films, under the name Junko Fuji. She became a star overnight.

As Paul Schrader would say in 1974, she is maybe the first actress to equal her male counterparts Ken Takakura and Koji Tsurata. Her talent explodes in this codified noir sub-genre, embracing her heroine’s cause in all its duality. Paul Schrader described Oryu as “a graceful and polite woman, who under given circumstances, can exact violent revenge on an oppressive man without ever losing her femininity”. The Red Peony embodies the paradox of a feminine reappropriation of the Yakuza eiga, a genre traditionally defined by its exclusively male world, where women were either sidelined or entirely absent.

While Seijun Suzuki imposed his dark noir thrillers sublimated by the violence of an almost autistic Joe Shishido, or while Kinji Fukasaku asserted his brutally hard-edged style before anarchising the crime genre with his “fights with no code of honor”, The Red Peony brought an unprecedented grace to the ninkyō eiga, balanced between blade and spirit, a romanticization of the genre close to melodrama; where the feminine characters’ traditional narrative archetypes become strengths, adding extra depth, far from the muteness of their male counterparts.

Rather than losing steam or becoming repetitive, each new opus of our yakuza gambler with the peony tattoo raises the stakes, anticipating TV series and delving deeper into character psychology. Each episode feels like a reunion with a familiar friend. Aesthetically, the filmmakers experiment new things, especially through increasingly sophisticated spatial compositions. One of the most fascinating aspects of this series comes from seeing the relationship to violence in exploitation cinema gradually evolve, with its constraints and demands changing to satisfy the needs of viewers always hungry for new thrills. The apocalyptic finales feature blood splurts worthy of the goriest chambara movies.

Adored by Tarantino who paid homage to her in Kill Bill, The Red Peony is more than a heroine: she heralds a revolution that will open the gates for many other fantastic female rebels like Lady Snowblood and Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion.

In collaboration with Carlotta Films.