‘Renoir' Review: An 11-Year-Old Girl Ponders the Mysteries of the Universe in Chie Hayakawa's Extremely Low-Key Coming-of-Age Drama
An article published in a 1982 edition of the research journal Social Science & Medicine found that an overwhelming percentage of Japanese doctors neglected to share terminal diagnoses with their patients, as they felt it was unethical to condemn someone to a death sentence. That information is only glancingly alluded to in Chie Hayakawa's 'Renoir,' a diaphanous coming-of-age story that's only clouded by the burden of unbecoming (no surprise to anyone familiar with Hayawaka's dystopian euthanasia drama 'Plan 75'), but the principle behind it haunts the film's young heroine all summer long.
Her name is Fuki (gifted 11-year-old Yui Suzuki), she lives in a sunny Tokyo suburb at some point during the country's transitional period in the late 1980s, and she's almost subconsciously convinced that people aren't telling her something. There's a gap between her and the rest of the world, and it only grows wider after her dad ('Shoplifters' star Lily Franky) is admitted to the hospital during the final months of his bout with cancer. It's not as if the girl doesn't know about death (her short story 'I'd Like to Be an Orphan' has one of her teachers asking a lot of questions answered by the story), but the distance between recognizing mortality and living in its shadow is vast, and Fuki is desperate for someone to help close it for her.
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Of course, Fuki doesn't know what she doesn't know, and her mother Utako (Ishida Hikari) — who often talks as if her daughter weren't able to hear her — has no interest in telling her. 'Do we cry because we feel sorry for the dead,' the girl asks herself in a rare snippet of voiceover, 'or because we feel sorry for ourselves?' Her only answer is to not cry at all; to keep a straight face and listen for the secret frequencies of the universe for guidance.
Inspired by an American mentalist she sees on TV, the ever-imaginative Fuki becomes obsessed with telepathy; it starts with guessing what card someone might be thinking of, and quickly evolves into 'hypnotizing' a grief-stricken neighbor into talking about her late husband. Later, Fuki will neigh at a horse in an effort to understand them, listen to her own voice echo around a tunnel in the hopes of hearing something she couldn't distill from her thoughts, and even meet a grown man from a telephone dating service in a singularly harrowing sequence that reflects Hayakawa's continued fascination with the darkest parts of the human psyche. It's a fascination that's on full display from the opening moments of 'Renoir,' and renders the entire film allergic to the cuteness that seeps into so many coming-of-age stories like it.
Animated by the creative spark that pops and fizzes behind Suzuki's eyes at all times, Fuki remains a compelling figure despite her refusal to betray her feelings to the outside world, and 'Renoir' leans on the character's quiet mystery as the movie drifts from one semi-connected episode to the next. Hayakawa is a plaintive storyteller who refuses to indulge in emotional cheats of any kind, and would rather a scene be impenetrably oblique than overexplain its purpose. 'Renoir' may not be quite as sterile as 'Plan 75' (a low bar), but the film is reserved enough for its title — a reference to 'the painter of happiness,' whose work is glimpsed for a half-second in the background of one shot — to feel like a perverse joke at Fuki's expense.
It's possible that Hayakawa may have been inspired by the warm lighting found in some of Renoir's work, but there are few moments in which she allows her movie to indulge in the effervescence of a Tokyo summer, and even fewer in which she conflates the country's rapid transition with the equally seismic changes that befall her young heroine. Hayakawa's script eschews any sweeping commentary in favor of a more honest and incidental portrait of growing up — one that would rather be true to the reality of Fuki's experience than mold it to fit the poetic forms of adult memory.
The film's plotting is elliptical (Utako's maybe affair with the counselor at her anger management seminar is filtered through a child's understanding), its direction unimposing to the point of feeling unformed, and its poignancy more rooted in the slow build of Fuki's snowballing isolation than it is in the moment when someone finally breaks through it. There are a handful of memorable episodes along the way, such as the nightmare fuel of Fuki's aforementioned pedophile encounter, and the much nicer sequence in which she spends a day at the track with her father, but incidents like that only have so much value to a story whose beats only matter so far as they help broker Fuki's connection to the world beyond her.
As would be the case in real life, there's no single incident that explains how Fuki grows over the course of that one fateful summer (even if one especially meaningful gesture towards the end helps pull her out of her silent isolation). But 'Renoir' — with its faint traces of sentiment, and complete absence of sentimentality — delicately articulates the girl's inner child in a way that allows us to feel it expand across the season. Life can try to keep its secrets from her, but it's only a matter of time before someone as curious and deprived as Fuki is able to discover them all for herself.
'Renoir' premiered in Competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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