Killing theViolet is a feature film made in Japan by a Chinese director, which has its premiere at the 7th Pingyao International Film Festival. It was nominated for the Roberto Rossellini Honorary Best Film and eventually won the Most Popular Film in the Crouching Tigers Section. Director Zhang Yu made the film her graduation work for her master degree of filmmaking at Tokyo University of the Arts. It is conceivable that Kiyoshi Kurosawa, professor of the Graduate School of Film and New Media, has a strong influence on the cinematographic style of this film. As a famous Japanese director, he is adept at creating daily horrors through details that bring forth unexpected thrillers in the daytime.

The film begins with an abrupt accident. Sumire is an established writer who proofreads manuscripts for publishers. However, her world is turned upside down after a courier enters the house, as her boyfriend leaves the door unlocked. While Zhang keeps attention on moderation and calmness in the tension of how Sumire should perform, through the stress of the environment, the gaze of the characters, and the observation of her acts, we can still feel that it is rather difficult for Sumire to vent her inner emotions filled with turbulence.

In the world of Sumire, the male becomes the shadow of an untrustworthy, dangerous, even symbolic Other. For example, her boyfriend who spends all day and night with her but disgusts her for the fact that she has been assaulted, the neighbour to whom she lends a book but misunderstands her pure kindness, and even when it comes to male strangers visiting her house every time, it irresistibly reminds her of that terrible afternoon ... Since Sumire was raped, she has developed a strong sense of fear and distance from the men around her, due to the physical trauma that results in a psychological degree of terror. Paradoxically, such terror is precisely derived from the shock of how females find severance of their own bodies.

There is a representative scene when Sumire is pushed against a desk by the courier, she hallucinates herself sitting at her desk, indifferently witnessing the assault without doing anything. What we see here is actually the suppression of gender power — both Sumire’s failure to resist and the inability to stop such violence point to patriarchal society’s oppression and control of women’s physicalities and mentalities. As Frye and Shafer point out, rape renders the victim a vision of herself as a being within someone’s domain of control rather than as a being that occupies that domain. In other words, the root cause of the entire brutality may have more to do with the rapist’s non-sexual motivation, especially his desire for dominance and control. Therefore, Sumire is deprived not only of her involuntary desires but also of the power to control her own body, as well as the part of freedom which makes subjectivity effectively exercised under the social structure as such. This is why Cahill would say that “rape must be understood fundamentally ... as an affront to the embodied subject ... a sexually specific act that destroys (if only temporarily) the intersubjective, embodied agency and therefore personhood of a woman.”

The role of Sumire, played by excellent Japanese actress Saori Koide, perfectly illustrates the psychological pressure that women endure after such a tragedy. When the camera focuses on her flirty face, a rich and complex emotion emerges from her expression and eyes: agony, confusion, pain, bitterness, with the looming risk of collapse, weaving into the boundary of repression and outburst repeatedly. Sumire does not commit suicide because of this single incident, but it is the ordinary suffering after experiencing an unexpected misfortune that feels most intolerant.

This may explain why the tense of the film title is progressive instead of perfect. What is killing Violet is not a fatal incident but a near-death state. Through the angle of Sumire, the film depicts her daily life hanging around men with different roles. It attempts to explore the horror that Japanese females feel in the sense of social ethics, in combination with the misplacement of characters, the abrupt change of plot, and the threat of the surroundings. The flower language of violets is eternal beauty and love, which often symbolizes women’s pursuit of pure and ideal things. The indoctrination of Killing Violet in a sociological and feminist analytical way, thereupon, is that the act of rape brutally and directly triggers the severance of female bodies and that their individual consciousness has long been repressed and controlled in every way by male-dominated social structures, which not only obliterates their original expectations of beauty and love between the sexes, but more significantly, leads to annihilation and destruction of body’s eternity, continuity, and subjectivity.