Zipper and Tits

A surprise hit in last year’s Tokyo Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Shirakawa Koji’s latest gets inside the heads of two prostitutes: a young rent boy and a 30yearold woman. The film comprises two parts. In Zipper the boy works the city streets, servicing his johns in a backalley, and goes home to a boyfriend who takes him completely for granted. Thanks to the hypocrisy/hostility of many of the johns, the boy’s selfesteem is so low it barely registers on the scale. In Tits the woman works in the small apartment she shares with a boyfriend who cooks for her and serves as her banker. The episode centres on the day she receives her first female client, a brittle, unsympathetic woman who turns out to have an ulterior motive for coming. Not long after, the boyfriend moves out.Shirakawa’s previous work (shown in Rotterdam in 2000) started from subjective positions and explored psychological problems from the inside. Here he achieves a similar intensity of vision and a similar sense of abject humiliation through overly fictional characters. His powerful, expressionist visuals and sexual frankness build a wounding sense of what it means to lose even your sense of loss. Zipper & Tits is not an easy film to enjoy, but its journey to the end of the night is ultimately cathartic. Tony Rayns