In his romantic drama The Egoists, as in all of his films, Hiroki Ryuichi does not trumpet his presence with bold stylistic flourishes; instead his camera seems to float and hover discreetly, so as not to disturb the ambiance of an intimate scene.
At the same time, this veteran of the pinku (soft porn) film business has none of an earlier era’s (often censor-enforced) shyness about sex. Instead, Hiroki is a mix of sensualist and psychologist, who can film a hot bed scene while stripping his characters’ souls as bare as their skins.
Hiroki draws the best from his actresses especially, while demanding a lot from them. But even in their rawest emotional moments, with tears streaming down their faces, he brings out their inner beauty. Shinobu Terajima in Vibrator (2003), Yu Aoi in The Lightening Tree (2010) and now Anne Suzuki in The Egoists have all never looked — or performed — better on screen.
Suzuki plays Machiko, a pole dancer at a Kabukicho club who becomes instantly enamored of Kazu (Kora Kengo), a gaunt, fierce-eyed young gambler who dashes off with her one night when the club is trashed by gangsters. Kazu is in fact one of the trashers, a job forced on him by a gang boss (Murakami Jun) in return for erasing a gambling debt.
This story of young lovers on the run, based on a novel by the late Nakagami Kenji (1946-1992), is a movie staple. As filmed by Hiroki, the Kabukicho scenes have a contemporary, borderless, dangerous feel, but once the action shifts to Nakagami’s hometown of Shingu, Wakayama Prefecture, the atmosphere (and accents) change. We are in the familiar territory of the Japanese family drama, where ancient crimes and animosities fester, but ties are not easily broken.
By returning to his home in the countryside, Kazu hopes to escape his old life and start a new one with Machiko. Having accepted Kazu’s invitation to flee, while not knowing where or why, Machiko is at a loss at first, especially when Kazu’s well-off, short-fused father (Kobayashi Kaoru) all but turns them away at the door. She and Kazu move to a nearby apartment and Kazu takes a job as a deliveryman for his uncle (Taguchi Tomorowo), the testy owner of a liquor store, while she tries to fit in with Kazu’s punk friends.
Despite their attempts at normality, Kazu’s family sees him as a black sheep and Machiko as Tokyo trash. They get a friendly reception from an elderly, eccentric cafe proprietress (Mako Midori), who was the lover of Kazu’s grandfather, but it all starts to go wrong, especially after Kazu foolishly borrows a large sum of money from an implacable loan shark (Omori Nao). His dream is live happily ever after in wedded bliss with Machiko, but his reality becomes a debtor’s hell, with Machiko as human collateral. Kora, who got his big-screen break playing a young killer in Hiroki’s M (2006), is the ideal choice as the wild, wounded Kazu: he’s got the lean, piercing look of a starving, soulful, world-defying wolf. What woman could resist?
Suzuki, who starred as a teen in the SF epic Returner (2002) and the Iwai Shunji’s friendship drama Hana and Alice (2004), delivers everything Hiroki asks for and more. Though her Machiko has a sex worker’s hard shell, she is intelligently alive to everything around her, from Kazu’s burning sincerity to the chill at his big family home. At the same time, she responds to Kazu’s outbursts of passion and anger with fires of her own. Theirs is a match of equals.