Even before “Sunburn” playfully takes the vantage point of a cockroach with its compound eyes, crawling around the apartment of Shay (Joshua Obra) and his sister Cee Cee (Arianna Shannon) in the St. James Town neighborhood of Toronto, it’s evident that writer/director Serville Poblete has an original perspective. Besides filming the making of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in intense closeup to make it appear far more complex than anyone mindlessly putting one together has ever considered, the film set on a mercilessly balmy summer day becomes the kind of chimerical rearranging of brain cells that one experiences in extreme heat where the warmth can feel comfortable until the point you start to feel it can sear you.
In fact, Poblete’s lovely debut is bound to leave a mark as he follows a group of teens in August when blackouts have left only limited power to play video games and radial fans and ice cream are the last line of protection from the beating sun, sending them all outside to enjoy time they are vaguely aware may be some of the last they’ll spend together. That wistful quality has been in the air for coming-of-age tales from time eternal, but Poblete is careful not to make it the be all, end all of a loose narrative that coalesces around the bonds between three pairs of friends in various stages of their relationships from Cee Cee and Allie (Milan Deng), who just met when the former is left behind by her older brother and his friend Vince (Dashawn Blackwood), longtime pals, to Nia (Ericka Leobrera) and her friend Britney (Trinity Lloyd), who are likely saying goodbye when they’re heading their separate ways after high school. The strands are somewhat tied together by Shay’s effort to work up the courage to ask out Nia after years of pining away at her from afar, but any time anything resembling a plot kicks in, Poblete wisely pulls back when it’s just so much more rewarding to be in the company of these kids passing the time.
A little more Kevin Smith than Richard Linklater when these casual conversations will often pick on little-discussed minutiae and potentially drift into the perverse — Nia and Britney have a subversively innocent exchange about pubic mounds — the film feels completely unforced and Poblete, working with cinematographer Christian Bielz, constantly keeps the camerawork as lively as the chatter with inspired visual ideas, making particularly great use of the skyscrapers where the teens all have grown up and now just look to find their footing on the ground. The climbing temperature leads to things being said that might ordinarily might not, both profound and utterly stupid when the heat has a way of revealing the subconscious and while Shay fumbles to get the right words out to Nia after trying to come up with the perfect line, the film would seem to take its own advice when he’s frequently told “just be yourself,” which produces such beauty elsewhere as characters’ aspirations emerge naturally, as do their vulnerabilities, over the course of a long day. It may be true that all that characters may want to set their sights a little higher when there is a certain fear about what lies over the horizon being so young and they all clearly hold such promise, but by the time the sun sets in “Sunburn,” it’s equally understandable why anyone would think it just doesn’t get any better than this.
“Sunburn” does not yet have U.S. distribution.