Our second Opening Night program presents the US premieres of two startlingly differ ent stories about writers who are devoured by erotic obsession.

Hisayasu Sato's Muscle starts with a fleshy muscle-men montage, and a torrid sex scene which ends with one lover cutting off the oth­er's arm — that's just in the first three min­utes! In Tokyo, a journalist for a physique magazine falls into a demented, operatic S/M affair with a dangerous bodybuilder. Muscle's pleasures don't lie within its plot (of which there's not much, anyway), but in its passionate perversity. While Muscle is one of the hottest, most exciting discoveries of the year, be warned: it is certainly not for the faint­-hearted.