My Sunshine

Baseball and hockey dominate the first few scenes, but it wouldn’t quite be accurate to call multihyphenate Hiroshi Okuyama’s second feature a sports movie. It’s really a tender coming-of-age drama that follows Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama), a sensitive preadolescent with a speech impediment who eschews the athletic pursuits expected of a boy his age, as he instead tries his hand at something rather unexpected: ice skating. Is it a coincidence that he becomes fixated on the sport after watching the gifted Sakura (Kiara Nakanishi) perform her routine on the rink? Probably not, but he nevertheless seems more transfixed by the sharp blades’ balletic motions than he is by the girl wearing them.

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The implications of that subtle difference play into the rest of the narrative. Both kids are shepherded by Arakawa (Sōsuke Ikematsu), a skater-turned-coach who takes the two of them under his wing. Sakura is more talented, but Takuya reminds him of himself — an initially harmonious dynamic that slowly lends itself to jealousy and worse. You’d be forgiven for thinking My Sunshine is a conflict-free ode to the innocence of youth in its early stages — it’s a testament to Okuyama’s sly ability to nest one dramatic layer within another.

Okuyama, a 28-year-old who wrote, directed, edited, and shot the film himself, made his feature debut with 2018’s Jesus. Given his accomplishments, one wonders whether his focus on gifted youngsters is autobiographical. There’s a soft, gauzy quality to Okuyama’s cinematography, which evokes the nostalgic feel of home movies while still being incredibly precise — you could pause on any frame and make a Polaroid of it. This, along with repeated use of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” on the soundtrack, lends the proceedings an almost fairytale quality — you can almost imagine the whole movie taking place inside a snowglobe. (It actually takes place on Hokkaido, the second-largest and arguably most picturesque of Japan’s four main islands.)

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The film is effective not in spite of its modesty but because of it. There are no grand pronouncements about what it’s like to no longer be a child, no shouting matches, no climactic ice-skating tournament where the kids triumph over unwholesome competitors. But the film’s many small moments — like when Takuya neglects a fly ball headed his way to watch the year’s first snowflakes fall on the baseball diamond — add up to more than the sum of their parts.

You could pause on any frame and make a Polaroid of it.

My Sunshine itself is not unlike ice skating, a perilous balancing act that can be either stately or disastrous depending on the skill of the performer. Fortunate, then, that all of the principals on both sides of the camera are in sync through every maneuver. The result is understated without being slight and bittersweet but never saccharine. In other words, it’s a lot like a childhood memory you recall fondly even if you can’t remember all the details.

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And yet what appears, in the first hour, to be a pleasingly low-key slice of life turns into something sadder in the third act as a small moment of cruelty forever alters the trio’s dynamic. Sometimes three really is a crowd, especially when one person’s beliefs are at odds with those of the other two. There’s beauty in this elegant fragility, but also looming heartache.