Ecstasy of the Angels

Koji Wakamatsu spent the pink-film era smuggling revolution into softcore, and this is where the charge goes off. A radical cell whose members answer to code names like October and Autumn botches a weapons raid, splinters over who to blame, and turns its violence inward while the sex scenes keep the censors fed and the politics keep detonating underneath. Wakamatsu shoots it half in grimy black-and-white and half in sudden colour, closer to a Godard argument than to anything else sharing its double bill. It arrived in 1972 with Japan's actual radical left eating itself in real time, and it carries the queasy authority of something reported from the inside. Not an easy watch, and not pretending to be one.