Heart, Beating in the Dark (original version)

Nagasaki's original outlaw classic plays like a 'wrong-side-of-the-tracks' answer to Oshima's Ai no corrida: it's a love story that is brutal, messy, hopeless and finally horrifying, but a love story nonetheless. Ringo and Inako are a young couple on the run from something. They borrow a room for the night from Ringo's former college friend Shimamoto. During the night, between episodes of rough sex and a bout of food poisoning, they act out flashbacks to the history of their relationship - in which they exchange roles and genders. We also see two sections of a documentary interview with Onda Tetsuji, who works in a school for handicapped kids. In other words, dramatic intensity comes up hard against modernist innovation. With fearless performances from Muroi Shigeru and Naito Takeshi and an aesthetic approach that pushes synch-sound Super-8 film making to its limit, this is one of the greatest Japanese films of its decade. (TR)