‘The Color of the Sun’ Review: A Teenager in Okinawa Navigates Grief and Longing in an Attractive but Undercooked Coming-of-Age Drama

Though the genre did of course exist before 2017, it feels as though Call Me By Your Name kicked off a boom in the dreamy, summertime coming-of-age movie, of the artier and indie-r variety. If you’ve traveled the festival circuit in the last decade or so, you’ve seen myriad examples of the form: teenagers in sun-kissed locales making first discoveries about themselves, about sexuality, about the grownup world rushing at them. 

Some have been quite good — the recent Cannes standout La Gradiva comes to mind — while others have been perhaps a little too ethereal, or too interior. Some derivativeness has taken hold in the space, a repetition of tone and tempo that makes many of these films seem like elegantly shot carbon copies of each other. It’s the same sunny melancholy, the same furtive explorations of self — and, quite often, muted queer undertones. At this point I would happily welcome a raunchy teen comedy like we used to get all the time. Enough with the pensive mood pieces; bring back the pie f**king! 

Well, okay, maybe I don’t want to take things that far. But I did feel some frustration watching Xavier Tera’s debut film The Color of the Sun, a beautifully filmed (by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, who also shot Call Me By Your Name) and scored wander through a teenager’s summer that is so stylishly withholding that there’s almost nothing to grab onto. It’s a whole aesthetic, as I believe the kids say these days (please don’t correct me if they don’t), but where’s the real substance? 

To be fair to Color of the Sun, it is doing some novel things. It’s the rare film set on and around Okinawa, the Japanese island far south of the mainland that was occupied by the United States for decades following WWII. Japan regained sovereignty over the island in the 1970s, but the American military still has a heavy presence there, continuing tensions between locals and the armed colonists surrounding them. That’s a pretty evocative setting for a film, with the perpetual drone and roar of fighter jets overhead and an air of constricting menace pervading what should otherwise be placidly idle summer hours. 

It’s a place that rising high school senior Kamei (Naoto Shimajiri) longs to escape, though where and to do what he’s not sure. He’s a listless kid, majorly knocked off course by the death of his father a year prior. He’s testy with his mom, aloof with his friends, and shy and fumbling with a girl who expresses romantic interest in him. There’s both a lot and not much at all going on in Kamei’s life, which is complicated by his dawning friendship — and maybe something more — with an American military brat, Colin (West Mulholland, Presence). Kamei speaks in Okinawan Japanese and Colin in English, but they seem to understand one another just fine, even if Colin is far more chipper and gregarious than sullen, withdrawn Kamei. 

He’s so sullen and withdrawn, unfortunately, that he’s barely a character. We’re aware, vaguely, of what happened to him in the past, and can see with our own eyes what is occurring in the present. But we have no real sense of Kamei’s inner life, of the desires and fears and hopes that motivate him. We have to infer a lot from, yes, the scant context clues of the movie, but mostly from our knowledge of how these narratives typically play out. 

Perhaps keen to those clichés, Tera works hard to avoid them. So hard that he pares his film down to the thinnest of structures. There are a couple of awkward sexual encounters, an argument or two with Kamei’s mom, a wary reconciliation with his paternal grandfather, and that’s about it. Heaps of plot aren’t required, of course, but one watches Color of the Sun with a constant itch for something to burst through the movie’s mannered stillness and liven up the picture.

There is also the unsatisfied intrigue about Okinawa itself, its culture and temperament and attitudes toward mainland Japan. There is a secessionist movement at work on the island, which is represented in the film, but we never really learn how such things affect Kamei’s sense of place in the world. Tera is to be commended for selecting such a fascinating location; if only he did more with all of its thematic and narrative potential. 

A more concrete suggestion of what the film is trying to say emerges toward the end, but then it feels hurried, tacked on. We hear Kamei’s mother in voiceover, reading a letter she has sent to her son, apologizing for her distance following the death of Kamei’s father and encouraging him to be whoever he wants to be in life. Is she talking about education? Career? His sexuality? We really don’t know, and Tera has not given us enough on which to hang any sort of theory or tentative understanding. 

The origins of the film lie in a photobook that Tera did in partnership with designer Marc Jacobs’ consumer goods empire, and it’s plain to see that Tera enjoys capturing alluring images of Okinawa and its people. But nice photography is not a sturdy enough basis for a narrative film, as so many lovely but inert art-house movies have shown us in recent years. I almost wish that Tera would get a second shot at making a film about a young man living on contested land and feeling displaced within himself. There’s a great story in there, but Tera has yet to find it.