Review | Cannes 2024: My Sunshine movie review – sensual ice dancing in Japanese director Hiroshi Okuyama’s follow-up to Jesus
- Hearts will melt watching My Sunshine, which follows the story of two young ice dancers and their coach in a small Japanese town over one winter
- Hiroshi Okuyama’s film has a colour palette that gives everything a dreamy quality and an understated screenplay, and the young cast give heartfelt performances
4/5 stars
Rarely has figure skating been shown as so pure, poetic and sensual than in My Sunshine, Hiroshi Okuyama’s feature about two young ice dancers and their coach over one winter in a small town in Hokkaido, in Japan.
Filmed in the classic four-by-three screen ratio and boasting a desaturated colour palette which gives everything a dreamy quality, My Sunshine revolves around Takuya (Keitatsu Koshiyama), a stammering boy who is as awkward at sport as he is with his speech.
Bad at school in both baseball and ice hockey, the boy finds himself captivated by figure skating – or, specifically, the elegant star skater Sakura (Kiara Nakanishi). His perseverance in trying out pirouettes is noted by the girl’s coach Arakawa (Sosuke Ikematsu), who gives the boy proper skates and then private lessons.
Sensing a prodigy in the waiting, Arakawa begins to train Takuya alongside Sakura to compete in a pairs skating competition. Through this, the man rediscovers the joie de vivre he seems to have left behind after his retirement and relocation to the rural hinterlands.
