(闇打つ心臓)

dir. Shunichi Nagasaki, 1982

72 min, Japan

In Japanese with English subtitles

This ANTI-VALENTINE’S Spectacle Theater presents Shunichi Nagasaki’s HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK. In this bleak anti-romance, a couple on the lam retreats to a tumbledown apartment where their anxieties boil to sexual and violent heights. Shot on 8mm, this early work by one of Japan’s most underappreciated subversive filmmakers remains one of his most unbridled works of pure nihilism.

Swaying to its jazz soundtrack, HEART, BEATING IN THE DARK offers an improvisatory mishmash of recollections wherein the film’s leads adopt rituals of reclusiveness to cope with their reality. From this solitude, a tender vulnerability yearning to be understood makes itself known. Nagasaki, showing the wreckage of youthful souls that took too many wrong turns, generously offers mangled bits of heart to his viewers, hoping they tend to the wounds, rather than disappear to the same state of alienation.