Heart, Beating in the Dark

The finest achievement in recent Japanese cinema, Nagasaki’s film revisits the indie classic he shot on Super-8 in 1982. The initial proposal from the producers was a remake, another version of the story about a young couple on the run with a very guilty secret. After all, not too many people ever had the chance to see the amazing original. But Nagasaki had more interesting ideas: he wanted to see what had become of the original outlaw couple, Ringo and Inako, twenty years on, and to compare their feelings about their criminal past with the plight of a young couple in a similar predicament today. The original actors (then unknown, now famous) are happy to reprise their roles, but Naito Takeshi in particular sees this as a chance to revise the earlier film. He wants to criticise the character he played 23 years ago. Well, not so much criticise… What he really wants to do is punch the guy he used to be. The new Heart, Beating in the Dark resists any easy classification but its warmth and humour make it easy to enjoy. It’s a searching, extremely moving meditation on the ‘outlaw’ mentality, on parenting, on ‘growing up’ … and on the implications of storytelling itself. —Tony Rayns