Photograph: Loaded Films
A painting by the 19th century French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir appears only fleetingly in this sweet and meandering 1980s story of an imaginative schoolgirl navigating change and tragedy in her small family. But maybe the nod to Renoir's La Petite Irène says something about Chie Hayakawa's ambitions to get at the truth of what's going through the head of 11-year-old Fuki (Yui Suzuki) as her father Keiji (Lily Franky) confronts serious illness and her mother Utako (Hikari Ishida) juggles work with the increasingly pressures of home life.
Maybe the Japanese writer-director is nodding to the '80s as a time of huge change in Japan, too, just as Renoir was the house painter of industrialisation and urbanisation in his time.
Renoir is young Fuki's story, and it's her worldview that Hayakawa leans into, with young actress Suzuki an intriguing presence throughout. We're led to believe that Fuki has been murdered right at the start, only to learn that it's a flight of her imagination – a suggestion that not everything we see and hear will be strictly true.
It's as interesting for what it doesn't show as for what it does
Mostly, though, this is a humanist portrait of the relationships within a family and what impending grief is doing to them, individually and collectively. Each has their own coping mechanism: mum goes to a fortune teller; dad is persuaded to invest in some health quackery; and the little girl starts to call a phone dating service, leading to a chilling episode involving her crossing town to meet up with a paedophile.
It's as interesting for what it doesn't show as for what it does. This is a story of terminal illness, but it exists in and around the main events rather than depicting them head-on. It's a tender, loose and slightly whimsical tale.
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