‘Egoist’ Review: Surprising Plot Twists Steer Steamy Gay Melodrama Into Maudlin Territory
The love of self and the love of others are deeply intertwined, according to everyone from ancient philosophers to “Drag Race” host Ru Paul. We must be anchored in a solid space of self-love in order to let someone else into our lives. On its surface, this is the key tenet of Daishi Matsunaga’s “Egoist” (ergo its title). But that sentiment serves instead to highlight how this maudlin Japanese drama about a gay man in his 30s coping with love and loss, rarely moves beyond the readymade platitudes that litter its well-meaning narrative.
Based on the late Makoto Takayama’s autobiographical novel of the same name, “Egoist” follows Saitô Kôsuke (Ryohei Suzuki), a magazine editor whose picture-perfect life includes an immaculately designed condo, a quick-paced job surrounded by fashion and photography, a closet full of beautiful designer clothes and a coterie of gay male friends with whom he handily gets along. And yet, from early in the film, it’s clear there’s a pall over his life. The loss of his mother many years ago still haunts him. The lack of a love life confounds him.
So he hires a young hot personal trainer, Nakamura Ryûta (Hio Miyazawa). Their chemistry is palpable from their first meeting, and the romance, however furtive it must remain (the better to keep Ryûta’s mother in the dark about their relationship), is endearing. Soon, as a cloying montage telegraphs, their budding relationship is in full bloom, with stylish and well-to-do Kôsuke taking the young Ryûta almost under his wing.
But in the first of many seemingly insurmountable (but soon enough dispensed with) obstacles that will come their way, Ryûta skittishly shares a secret about his life he worries his lover won’t be able to overcome. The secret is best left unspoiled. But it forces both halves of the couple to reassess what it is they want out of life and out of each other.
The weight of Ryûta’s confession is shot with a claustrophobically-placed hand-held camera that fussily detracts from the emotion either actor would be capable of conjuring. Matsunaga stages this most pivotal of early scenes with a clumsiness that makes all that follows harder to buy into. For try as Suzuki and Miyazawa do to breathe life into their respective characters, script and cinematography conspire constantly to make these two young men look and feel two-dimensional, capable only of bright smiles or dour groans, with little in between.
Flirting with melodrama, Matsunaga never quite finds the right tonal balance between the earnestness of a sun-dappled romance he sketches and the more depressing story about grief he ends up crafting — especially once Kôsuke gets to meet Ryûta’s mother (Yuko Nakamura) and takes a liking to her. Coming after such sentimental plot trappings, the film’s final third-act surprise remains mostly unearned. That’s because so much of the dramatic tension that fuels Kôsuke and Ryûta’s love story remains quite plastic, each revelation and complication so easily ironed out that its narrative and emotional stakes feel almost incidental.
And so, while the film hints at some thorny themes around living openly in Japan as a gay man and how grief curdles inside you and colors your world, “Egoist” remains a rather sedate affair. The film suffers from a self-serious tone it breaks only during scenes with Kôsuke’s friends, whose brief conversations open up the world of “Egoist” in delightfully welcome ways — only to then be relegated to minor moments in favor of awkward exchanges between boyfriends, and later still between the two men and Ryûta’s mother. (The sex scenes, of which “Egoist” boasts a few, are so exactingly shot as to feel rather listless, even when they’re supposed to denote a hungered kind of desire Matsunaga’s camera never quite captures.)
With its languid pace and soap-opera-adjacent plot twists, Matsunaga’s film ends up playing like a well-intentioned tragic love story meant to tug at our heartstrings. But the film ties its many threads together so neatly that, like Kôsuke’s apartment, its stylish arrangement only makes it feel that much colder.
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