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Matsunaga Daishi’s Egoist is a love duet full of intimate gestures. “I hated my hometown so much, I fled it, at 18, for Tokyo,” confesses Kosuke (Suzuki Ryohei), in voiceover. “For me, clothes are armor.” Though the gay fashion magazine editor, who lost his mother at age 14, seems much more at home in the more socially liberal Tokyo, he still hides behind his sharp style and his money. That is, until he meets Ryuta (Miyazawa Hio), a fitness trainer to whom he feels an immediate bond. And through these two young men from decidedly different backgrounds, Matsunaga’s film considers how class, capitalism, and core wounds collide, infect, and also inspire the heart’s most tender desires.

It isn’t long after Kosuke starts training with Ryuta that the two become romantically linked. Theirs is a carnal connection that deepens and complicates as they learn more about each other. In some ways,...