While ultimately little more than a vehicle for the singer-songwriter YUI, Midnight Sun (Taiyō no Uta, or Song of the Sun) is a competently directed movie that capitalizes on the lead actress’s musical talents. But instead of the usual frothy comedy, Midnight Sun is a straight-up tearjerker.
YUI plays (no surprise) a young singer-songwriter named Kaoru, who is afflicted with a disease – in this case, Xeroderma Pigmentosa, which renders her skin lethally sensitive to ultraviolet radiation. But in a bit of a twist, Kaoru refuses to use her protective suit, and therefore lives a twilight existence by choice: sleeping by day, and busking in a deserted train station at night, with nothing but a candle balanced on her guitar case for company.
There isn’t a shred of plausibility in all of this – for starters, when was the last time you saw parents let their 16-year old daughter out all night, on their own? – and yet it works, kind of, due to the adorableness of the two leads. Kaoru develops a crush (from afar, of course, via her bedroom window) on a slightly clueless surfer boy named Koji (Takashi Tsukamoto, whom I think I last saw in Battle Royale). Will they ever meet? Will he go out with her? Will she gain more confidence in her musical skills, and will she ever get to record that album? You probably know the answer already.
Director Norihiro Koizumi doesn’t exactly have much good material to work with: the exposition is clumsy (the entire backstory is related by two cops in a cruiser, watching her play guitar all alone), and the film altogether sidesteps any of the very real trauma associated with the disease (YUI could have been shilling for Shiseido throughout). There is also a lost opportunity here to show the audience exactly what Kaoru has given up with her nocturnal life; we see some pretty shots of the sun rising and the city (Fukuoka, perhaps?) slowly waking up, but they’re shown long before we understand Kaoru’s condition.
And sometimes the film slides into unintentional camp. In one almost-fatal incident – Kaoru loses track of time and is caught outside on her date with Koji, as the sun rises – Koizumi has the impeccably bad taste to show the scene in slow motion, with a weeping Kaoru hurtling action-movie style through her door as the morning sun bursts gloriously through the trees, with Koji in baffled pursuit. I almost laughed, but it wouldn’t have been cool.
Nonetheless the film gets much of its mileage from the charms and awkwardnesses, not to mention the logistical difficulties, of their budding romance. (There’s a genuinely sweet scene when Koji announces his devotion to Kaoru as they stand at the train crossing where they first met: “I’ll stay up all night for you!” he yells.) Fans of YUI – a surprisingly decent actress, given the fact that acting isn’t her day job – will enjoy the musical sequences, with her trying out new songs in her room and, later, performing triumphantly to an eager crowd in the streets, just as YUI did earlier in her career.
In the end, Midnight Sun is more likeable than your average Disease-of-the-Week TV movie, but even its bittersweet conclusion pales in comparison to, say, the ambiguously lovely ending of Randal Kleiser’s The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976). No surprises here, just the inevitability of a young and beautiful death, and the comforting platitude that music lives on.
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