Hiroshi Okuyama is a director that relies on his own experiences to craft narratives. His feature-debut Jesus (2019) was informed by his childhood-experience of moving from Tokyo to a snowy rural area and going to a mission-school. To shape his second feature film, My Sunshine, he utilized his experience of learning figure-skating during elementary school and the wintery beauty that surrounded him as a child.

While neither of his narratives are autobiographical, the reliance on his own childhood experiences creates a fictional frame where Okuyama can work-through and delineate certain subjective truths. In other words, fiction – the phantasmatic machinery of desire – allows the subject to move beyond certain unresolved sentiments by offering it, in a fictional shape, to the Other – the audience.

The character that represents Okuyama is My Sunshine, is none other than Takuya Tada (Keitatsu Koshiyama) (General-note 1).  Takuya is a 6th grader who is quite uninvested in the sports he plays – baseball, ice-hockey. His whole presence emanates that he has no aim to enflame his desire and breathe meaning into his ego. However, one day, the grace of the ice-skating Sakura Mikami (Kiara Nakanishi) captures his gaze. Sakura seemingly enjoys figure-skating – she trains seriously under Hisashi Arakawa (Sosuke Ikematsu), a former professional figure-skater, yet the spectator cannot dispel the feeling that she is merely performing her mother’s desire (General-note 2). Arakawa, noticing Takuya’s interest in figure-skating and Sakura, begins to train him – a decision that breathes life into his own pleasure in coaching. Not long thereafter, he decides to pair them both and introduce them to ice-dancing.  

My Sunshine offers the spectator a celebration of the encounter by sketching out the transformative effects of an inter-subjective meeting, the way a simple act or signifier can stir the still stance of the subject and melt the frozen state of his desire, the budding of feelings of love.

In Okuyama’s narrative each character – Takuya, Sakura, and Hisashi – undergoes some form of subjective transformation. The stirring of desire affects their presence within the societal field, the way they relate to themselves and to the other – from cold still snow to peeping rays of sunlight, from breathing winter to radiating the joy of spring.   

The staging of the coming-of-age – or, as we like to call it, the coming-into-being of the subject, is – and this should not come to anyone’s surprise – function of the dimension of speech. There is a subtle evolution to be noted in Takuya’s enunciations and his silences. In the beginning of the narrative, his speech is littered with deflections, appeasing self-deceptions, non-committal retorts, and subtle stuttering (Psycho-note 1). With every signifier he pushes out of his mouth, he tries to efface his own subjectivity. However, this vocal effacement does not aim to hide his subjectivity from the Other, but the still nature of his lack-of-being (manque-à-être). What he lacks is a foundational aim for his subjective desire, a mooring support that would allow him to finally bring his subjectivity in play through formative acts and enunciations and produce meaning for his ego. My Sunshine, in fact, illustrates that a subject driven by desire – or feelings of love – is more inclined to put his subject into the signifier he addresses to the Other.  

Like many sport-narratives, My Sunshine also introduces an obstacle that endangers Hisashi’s project of ice-dancing. However, in Okuyama’s narrative, the obstacle is not physical nor mental, but social. The whole project the coach has put his energy into is put into jeopardy when Sakura discovers his sexuality – his attraction for men. This confrontation, which forces Sakura to compare Hisashi’s presence before and after he started coaching Takuya, gives rise to a bunch of ill-thought-out and outdated prejudices, prejudices which swaddling a simple hysterical question – do you love him more than me?  

Okuyama brings his narrative alive with a balanced combination of static and fluid dynamic shots. He opts for static shots to establish the setting, to stage conversational moments and present moments of compositional beauty.  The fluid dynamic shots, on the other hand, are utilized to bring the poetic beauty of figure-skating to life – i.e. the bodily movements during certain technical moves, and the bodily interactions to bring the dance-choreography alive with balanced precision.

While many sports-narratives favour a crude realistic frame, Okuyama takes a more poetic visual approach for his narrative. By playing with depth-of-field, he ensures that his characters are always embraced by a sea of softness. The dreamlike atmosphere shaped by Okuyama’s exquisite photography washes all crude elements away to single out and elegantly emphasize the simple beauty that generally remains unnoticed – e.g. flakes of snow falling, colour gradations of the evening sky, the bodily movements of an ice-skating girl (Cine-note 1).

As My Sunshine deals with the overcoming of internal obstacles to one’s desire, to one’s feelings of love, this visual softness could have flattened the impact of the staged (negative) emotions of struggle. However, Okuyama ensures that the emotional and psychological dimension remains palpable by two mutually reinforcing operations – one visual and one auditive.

At the visual level, Okuyama introduces dark shadows and blueish colours within his soft diffuse visuals – the soft patches of darkness becoming subtle evocations of the dark patches that linger within the subject’s psyche – the lack of direction that troubles our young subject. That darkness is consciously utilized as an evocative element is corroborated by the fact that Okuyama utilizes a sudden shift in lightning and colour – from cold darkish clouds to warming sunshine – to visualize the sudden appearance of light at the end of Takuya’s directionless tunnel.   

At the auditive level, Okuyama elegantly employs the dimension of silence, revealing Takuya’s silent presence as a non-verbal affirmation of his discontent, a clear yet unnoticed expression of his lack of investment in the ice hockey sport. Even in his enunciated signifiers the unsaid truth echoes: Ice-hockey does not produce meaning for him; it merely makes the time pass by.  

By choosing for a square aspect ratio, Okuyama can wield the compositional power of geometry more easily and amplify the visual impact of many shot-compositions. The square frame does not merely emphasize the arrangement of the compositional lines – e.g. the frames within frames, but allows these structuring lines improve the visual pleasure of the interplay between the diffuse light and the pastel-like colours.     

My Sunshine does not only please the spectator visually, but also succeeds in warming his heart. The power of the narrative to touch the spectator is due to the interaction of two elements: the naturalistic performances and Okuyama’s use of musical accompaniment.  

The performances of Sosuke Ikematsu, Kiara Nakanishi, and Keitatsu Koshiyama breathe genuineness into the conversational flow, allowing many interactions – the playful back-and-forth of signifiers, the subtle bodily interactions – to touch the spectator. The thoughtful musical accompaniment ensures that Takuya’s clumsy entrance into the world of figure-skating, the challenge of refining his technique to dance with Sakura, and the bond that blossoms between Takuya, Sakura and Hisashi has an endearing quality. Okuyama knows how to utilize music in a way that, notwithstanding all the icy imagery, will melt the spectator’s heart.

My Sunshine, Okuyama’s bittersweet celebration of youth – seishun, celebrates the importance of the encounter and of desire, the force that pushes the subject towards inter-subjective connection. Okuyama charms the spectator with a visual fabric that elegantly emphasize the beauty in wintery landscapes as well as the warmth of human interactions. Of course, it is only because of the disarming performances of Sosuke Ikematsu, Kiara Nakanishi, and Keitatsu Koshiyama that the latter warmth is able to radiate so strongly and warm his heart – melting the coldness of adult life for a fleeting moment away. In short, highly recommended.

Notes

General-note 1: That Takuya represents Okuyama in the narrative is corroborated by the fact that he gave his protagonist a stammer to reflect his own childhood habit of clearing his throat.

General-note 2: In our viewpoint, Sakura reflects both elements of Okuyama and his older sister. The idea that Sakura merely enacts the mother’s desire echoes Okuyama’s own statement that he was merely following his ice-skating older sister. Sakura represents his sister in the sense that she, just like Okuyama’s sister, aims to become an athlete.

If we accept this reading, we must assume that the relation between Takuya and Sakura evokes both something of Okuyama’s relationship towards himself as well as his bond with his sister.   

Psycho-note 1: Let us fleetingly note that Takuya’s stammering is worst when he is, unexpectedly, forcedto put his subject on display.   

Cine-note 1: In some cases, Okuyama further enhances the beauty of movement by utilizing slow-motion shots.