With “My Sunshine”, Hiroshi Okuyama directs a second feature film which appears like a great, conventional utopia, in perfect accordance with the dark nature of its narrative’s stakes.
Ever since Patricia Mazuy turned it into the frozen theater of an immense teenage sorrow (Travolta and Me), the skating rink has concealed a double background offered by the reflections of the ice, – sparkling like crystal, sharp as a blade. For his second feature film, Hiroshi Okuyama chooses the rink as the perimeter of his story, starting with a very Billy Elliot-esque plot: a young field hockey player is struck by the moving vision of a young figure skater. The boy decides to trade in his hockey stick for somersaults, thus forming a partnership with the perfected dancer, guided by the wise advice of a kind coach, a powerful obstacle to the slander of the outside world.
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Hiroshi Okuyama gives pride of place to training scenes filmed like sumptuous old-fashioned ballets, faded pastel colors brought to life by vibrantly grainy images. With obstinacy, the filmmaker, intoxicated by the beauty of his images and determined to share it with others, analyses each gesture, embraces each movement whose only condition for existing is that of their power to appear. If My Sunshine is contrived by so much rapture, it’s because it would like to take the place of a closed environment. But deep down, it has not forgotten that reality and its ordeals permeate everything, even the most enchanted castles.
Traduction Emma Frigo
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