A sullen teenager living in Okinawa finds his life upended by the arrival of a boy raised on a nearby American airbase in Xavier Tera’s feature debut.
There’s no disputing that Xavier Tera’s feature debut is a good looking film; the photographer-turned-filmmaker captures the Japanese peninsula of Okinawa with unmistakable care, particularly during the fabled golden hour that bridges night and day. The area has a difficult relationship with identity given its history; from 1945 to 1972 it was occupied by the United States, and even since then there has been a strong military presence with the Air Force, Marine, Navy, and Army military all having bases across the three island groups. The tensions between Japanese and American occupants of Okinawa inform Tera’s film, where teenagers make the most of the summer sprawl.
Among them is Kamei Yara (Naoto Shimajiri, a natural in his first acting role), a sullen teenager about to enter his final year of high school in 2012. He lives with his mother who works long hours at a daycare centre; their relationship is contentious, as so many teen-parent dynamics are. In voiceover Kamei asks questions of his recently dead father, pondering if his teenage years were similar to his; he listens to an old tape of his ecological research to feel close to him. The din of military jets overheard is an intermittent soundtrack to the slightly conversations Kamei has with his friends about girls. Then, with all the subtly of a tank, a boy from an American airbase careens into Kamei’s social circle. Colin (West Mulholland) possesses all the self-assuredness that Kamei wishes he had; he’s not sure if he loves him or loathes him.
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Shot by Luca Guadagnino’s go-to cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (Tera was connected with him by the film’s producer Stella Savino, who worked on Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria), it’s fair to say that Tera’s film shares some DNA with the filmmaker who has come to define the post-millennium coming-of-age canon – anyone who watched the 2020 military base-set television series We Are Who We Are might note some similarities. If there’s one drawback to Tera’s film, it’s that the characters speak with the preternatural cadence of adults rather than 16-year-olds, and Tera – who has lived in Okinawa since 2020 – has a tendency to write exposition-heavy dialogue that doesn’t quite feel natural.
Even so, The Colour of the Sun is extremely promising as a debut feature, ambitious in its navigation of myriad themes including American imperialism, burgeoning queerness and adolescent sexual appetites. It’s clear that Tera’s talent extends beyond composing beautiful images, and we’ll likely be seen a lot more of him in the future.
