The Boxer

Terayama has here brilliantly fused the elements of his previous film and theatre work - surrealism, a sense of the essential anarchy of relationships, and a flair for startling and beautiful images - with a compulsively exciting Hollywood-style narrative about a young man's relentless ambition to be a champion boxer. The film synthesises these seemingly disparate approaches while allowing them separate existences, and through this evokes not only a poetic vision of modern industrial Tokyo and the fading dreams of the city's losers, but also a tense and realistic portrayal of the sheer brutaulity of the world of boxing, in its inexorable attraction and its heroic despair.