Writers: Jun Kurosawa, Akihiro Suzuki and Toshiko Takashi
Director: Akihiro Suzuki
This strange and haunting film from 1999 documents the lost boys of Tokyo: the porn stars, the rent boys and their pimps. Stories are embedded within stories, each mournful and desolate and some peter out into nothing, very much like life itself. Looking for an Angel was director Akihiro Suzuki’s debut film, and its portrait of sex work and the loneliness that often comes with it is deftly and elegiacally captured.
Reiko and Shinpei attend a wake for their friend Takachi at the house of a porn film director. Perhaps inappropriately for such an occasion, old footage of Takachi having awkward sex with a woman in a nurse’s outfit is screened on the wall behind the dinner table. Takachi doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself at all, probably because he was more into men. Reiko and Shinpei tell the other party guests how they met Takachi.
Reiko’s story also features a missing boy, the young and innocent Sorao, who turns up one day at Reiko’s flat asking if he can stay. She agrees but distrusts the man on the motorbike who waits for her new housemate outside on the street. She surmises, quite rightly, that this man is Sorao’s pimp. But perhaps the two men are in love, too. Sorao definitely seems to be enamoured as he holds tight to the other man as they race through Tokyo’s streets.
In a nice twist, it is the pimp who becomes the focus of the story rather than Sorao, who vanishes one day, leaving Reiko a note. The pimp is Takachi, and he himself disappears, returning to his home town of Kochi, about a nine-hour drive from the capital. He summons Reiko with a postcard. He has his own story to tell.
These odd friendships describe a time when random encounters in real life led to relationships being formed and sustained, very different to the world today, where we meet people in echo chambers online. Sections of Suzuki’s 60-minute film appear to be shot on Super 8, the edges of the frame catching fire like nostalgia in the same way as Derek Jarman portrayed London and the English countryside in the 1980s. But unlike Jarman’s more abstract short films, Suzuki’s narrative, rather than the images, propel the film.
And yet, while the bonds between Reiko and Takachi and also Reiko and Shinpei offer some hope, the sex scenes are cold and lack any affection. No one wants to kiss: Shinpei has boring sex in a toilet cubicle while Sorao rejects the kisses of his client, who, anyway, has his own agenda. In these scenes, the camera is alarmingly close, underlining the painful intimacy of such hook-ups. The final sex scene is filmed from a distance, but the act remains barren and perfunctory.
Sad and compelling, Looking for an Angel is an interesting addition to this year’s lineup of films at the Queer East Festival. It’s a snapshot of how queer lives were lived.
Looking for an Angel is screening at Queer East: On the Road 2025.
