(Excluded) Kill Bill: the legendary full version will soon be visible in France

The Whole Bloody Affair will be released in two stages here, first in cinemas on July 8 then on video in November.

“Revenge is a dish best served cold.”says the famous Klingon proverb at the opening of Kill Bill. And in the genre of “stuff that we let cool so that we can savor it better later”, Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair arises there. It has in fact been 22 years – since 2004 – that Quentin Tarantino fans have been hoping to discover this complete version, combining the two volumes of Kill Bill and featuring a new scene.

It’s time for the drum roll – or, to stay with the theme, the siren music ofIronsidethe one that sounds before a fight in the Bride: StudioCanal informs us in fact that Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair will arrive in French cinemas on July 8, for 4h35 long screenings (including a 15-minute intermission), some of which are in 70mm. The film will then be available on video (physical media and VOD) in November.

Shown for the first time during a special screening at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival (the year when Tarantino was president of the jury and where Kill Bill: Volume 2 was released at the cinema), The Whole Bloody Affair has since been visible during very sporadic screening-events, generally taking place at the New Beverly, the cinema that the director of pulp Fiction owns and programs in Los Angeles. This extended version ended up being distributed in American theaters at the end of last year, before being released there on VOD in February.

Including a new animated sequence (in the chapter devoted toorigin story by O-Ren Ishii), The Whole Bloody Affair also has the particularity of showing the “pitched battle at the Villa with Blue Leaves” (the enormous fight between the Bride and the Crazy 88s) in its glorious original colors – while in Kill Bill: Volume 1it is in black and white, a choice which was made to reduce the violence and thus avoid a ban on under 17s in the United States.

Thus reassembled (and expunged from the cliffhanger which concludes Volume 1 in the version we know), The Whole Bloody Affair corresponds to the original Tarantinian wish that Kill Bill only be seen as one and only one film. A gigantic tribute to the history of cinema, even more colossal and delirious in its long version. By finally releasing this montage into the wild, beyond the circle of privileged people at New Beverly, Quentin Tarantino is giving his fan club quite a bone to gnaw on. Enough, in any case, to wait until his next (and final) feature film, opus number 10… which is slow in coming, seven years after the release of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affairby Quentin Tarantino, with Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Lucy Liu… In cinemas on July 8 and on video in November.