Japanese women have been kicking male ass on film since the 1960s heyday of Fuji Junko and beyond (though Fuji preferred to slice her opponents with her swift sword). In fact, the sexy, mini-skirted chick as hard-fighting action heroine has become a genre cliché, with filmmakers competing to find new, ever more extreme gimmicks to hold flagging audience attention. If her high kicks aren’t enough, give her chain saws in place of arms.
Based on a novel by Sakuraba Kazuki, Sakamoto Koichi’s Girl’s Blood (Aka X Pinku) goes back to the basics of martial arts action, with no buzzing limb replacements and hardly any weapons in sight, save for a whip wielded by a pillowy-lipped dominatrix named Miko (Misaki Ayame). Also the mostly female cast expends real sweat, displays real fighting skills and takes dozens of painful-looking slams against steel mesh and other unforgiving surfaces, with little help from wires or CGI effects.
The story, admittedly, has its erotic exploitation aspect. A canny promoter (Yamaguchi Yoshiyuki) manages a “fight club” for women called Girl’s Blood, though the fighters, dressed in various costumes (nurse, idol, etc.), serve the customers as hostesses when they aren’t squaring off in the cage. Also, the fights are more entertainment than real fisticuffs, though some of the fighters are trained martial artists, with the best being Satsuki (Haga Yuria), an intense, no-nonsense type who bandages her breasts before her bouts and dresses in a dashing white costume like an otokoyaku (male role player) in the famous all-woman Takarazuka theater troupe. Girl’s Blood gains an improbable new recruit in Mayu (Koike Rina), who looks and acts like an innocent, harmless child, but becomes grimly determined in the cage, even as she takes a horrific beating. A more formidable addition is the curvy, smoky-eyed Chinatsu (Tada Asami), who wears a silk Chinese dress for her bouts and goes by the ring name Shanghai Girl Lily. Matched against Miko, Chinatsu proves to be a confident, merciless master of karate and wins by a knock out. Her next opponent, Satsuki, is far tougher challenge but Chinatsu is more than up to it, raining down kicks and blows, even as an undeniable sexual current passes between her and her opponent. Beaten for the first time at Girl’s Blood, Satsuki is determined to get revenge. But she is also wrestling with a new emotion: Love for her rival. And Chinatsu, it turns out, is more than willing to reciprocate.
Meanwhile, Miko has taken cute little Mayu under her wing – but perhaps their relationship is something more than friendship?
Lesbianism is a big theme in Japanese porn for straight males, but certainly not in mainstream films, while indie films on the subject, such as Ando Momoko’s A Piece of Our Life (Kakera, 2009) and Kaneko Shusuke’s Jellyfish (2013), are few and far between. And as for action films centered on two female couples, Girl’s Blood may well be the first, in or out of Japan. Also, while not skimping on the eroticism, the film gives its four main characters distinct personalities and dark back stories, while being entirely sympathetic to their choice of partners. The men who enter or re-enter their lives, such as Mayu’s creepily smarmy boyfriend (Maeyama Takahisa) or Chinatsu’s flagrantly abusive husband (Sakaki Hideo), disrupt same-sex romances that, as troubled as their beginnings might be, are genuine and strong. Will love, whatever its gender, prevail? Will the transgender Satsuki finally find happiness as a guy? Not the questions you’d expect in a film about women beating each other silly for kicks and profit, but Girl’s Blood rises above its genre clichés to become unexpectedly inspiring. It’s less a Fight Club with chicks, in other words, than a gay-themed Rocky.
Mark Schilling