Thursday, June 15, 2023

エゴイスト (Egoist)

エゴイスト (Egoist), dir. 松永大司 (Daishi MATSUNAGA), 2022, Japan, 120 min., in Japanese with subtitles 👏
Thursday, June 15, 8:30 pm, Castro • not available for streaming 

Two men and a woman take a selfie
Kosuke (Ryohei Suzuki, pictured left) is a successful fashion editor. He hires a personal trainer, Ryuta (Hio Miyazawa, pictured right). The two men begin flirting, which leads to more as it becomes clear that their interest is mutual, but as they become closer physically, Ryuta opens up more emotionally, about the lengths to which he has had to go to support his mother after his father skipped out on them. Kosuke, on the other hand, lost his mother as a teenager, so he gradually gets woven into Ryuta’s family. The emotional interplay of the three characters is well done, the sex scenes are fairly steamy, and we are along for the ride as Kosuke’s hard shell begins to crack. My main complaint is that the dénouement at the end of the film goes on and on and on and on and on, much longer than it should have. Cutting the film closer to 100 to 110 minutes would have been a good thing. Highly recommended.

IMDb pageOfficial website [mostly in Japanese] • trailer [English subtitles] •

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