DEPAYS7 STACK007

Text :

I don’t know how many films have been made about the Bake-neko.
That they should all be unknown in Europe tells a lot about this
temperamental peninsula. (In the US they can be seen on the West
Coast, thanks to the Japanese-language TV stations.) The plot is
always the same: a man is assassinated. The cat, a witness to the
murder, slips its spirit into the body of a woman -and then, whatever
the version, there is always a tremendous scene, the one where the
woman starts to mix the cat’s gestures into her own, when she begins
to slowly claw the air with her… paw, when she begins lapping instead
of drinking. This woman will become the instrument of revenge, and
she will make the killers her chosen prey. But what is very characteristic
is that this avenging character, finally quite appealing to popular
morality, will inevitably go too far. Once unleashed, her revenge
extends to innocent people, blood flows in rivers, and finally (after
we’ve seen, for example, a severed head soaring above the rooftops,
to quote one of the jewels in the genre) the tale comes to its ritual close
with the death of the cat-woman who takes back her true form, like
Doctor Jekyll or the Invisible Man. Once violence has been set free the
disorder spreads everywhere, and the elementary law of an eye for an
eye, a murder for a murder, is not enough, any idea of justice or redress
is merely pitiful, the violence will only stop by swallowing itself up,
like a volcano.