In the midst of a society that, as we are told by one of the characters in Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir, is characterized by diligence and modesty, young Fuki Okita (Yui Suzuki) is living on instinct and imagination. Her father (Lily Franky, familiar from the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda) is in hospital, slowly dying of cancer. She thinks her mother wishes he would die a little faster or, at the very least, maintain sufficiently critical symptoms not to be sent home. She’s probably right: Utako (Hikari Ishida) is not a home body.
The year is 1987, before the internet came to swallow girls like Fuki. Instead, she retreats into a cacophony of cable TV’s dimestore gurus handing out advice on telepathy and hypnosis. She practices transmitting the suits on cards to anyone prepared to play; she tries to divine where the TV remote has gone. Perhaps she has the gift. She believes she does because, as a girl with one foot still in childhood, she is open to believing anything. At first, it seems Hayakawa does too. This is, in fact, grounded in her own story; her own father died of cancer when she was a similar age.
Utako has her own, grown-up fantasies. With a new managerial position at work and a dreamy daughter, she has enough to do without caring for a half-dead husband she is unlikely to mourn. She snaps at Fuki; she nags her new underlings; she loses her grip in a sudden torrent of tears when she finds out Keiji has laid out a million yen on a bogus miracle cure, convinced he knows more than the doctors. For her free essay at school, Fuki writes a story headed “I Want to Be an Orphan.” Are there problems at home? a teacher asks Utako, who, predictably, is not about to open up to a stranger.
Fuki’s immediate problems are clear enough, but they merge with a more widespread fog of anxiety. An endemic sense of loneliness is not something she has on her own, an irony neatly illustrated by the messages on a telephone dating line she starts ringing regularly, listening to the voices of the hopeful and the despondent. One caller after another says they just want someone to talk to, maybe a girlfriend, maybe just a laugh after work with someone of a similar age. I have no friends, says one in a plain statement of need. Fuki listens, her face solemnly unsurprised. These are her people.
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She’s not the only one clutching at every hokey belief on the market, either; even her mother is lured into consulting a fortune teller. And, as she finds when she does make a new friend and is invited to birthday tea, hers is not the only family suspended in a kind of frozen mutual indifference. Like her own parents, her friend’s mother and father sit down to eat looking as if all they want is for this meal to be over.
Hayakawa’s first film was the excellent Plan 75 (2022), which deftly built a picture of Japan, just a few years into the future, dealing with its surplus of old people by offering a cash bonus to anyone who volunteers to check out early. It is entirely convincing; the sense of duty on the part of the old, their fear of humiliating poverty, the complacent acceptance among the young of the good sense and essential benevolence of the plan. Like that film, Renoir is shot largely with available light, giving it a stripped-back simplicity. When Fuki and her father go to the races, the sunshine provides a counterpoint to Keiji’s frailty; when characters are indoors, they often are reduced to silhouettes against windows on to a brighter world.
In other respects, however, Renoir is a much less resolved work. Plan 75 had an inherent focal point in the monstrous extermination plan, but Renoir feels scattered, as if a folder full of ideas about death, children and social isolation had been spread across a table and the director was picking up each page and thinking about it. Even the title feels random: Keiji once bought Fuki a print of Auguste Renoir’s portrait of a child called Irene. The director’s father once bought her a similar print, she says, but it feels arbitrary.
This is not to detract from the film’s beauty or the strength of the performances, particularly the arrestingly self-contained presence that is Suzuki’s Fuki. Nor is it to deny the poignancy and precision of individual scenes. Witness, in particular, the moment where Fuki supposedly hypnotizes a bereaved neighbor. The woman’s husband fell from their balcony; her trance frees her to admit she thought he was a creep. Her confession, made to a child, is breathtaking.
As is Fuki’s encounter with a pedophile she meets on the dating chatline: He is lonely too, something Fuki instinctively understands. This humanity is, in fact, Hayakawa’s hallmark. If this story doesn’t coalesce as seamlessly as her first film does, it still has the power to touch and then to haunt us. It doesn’t take a fortune teller to predict that Chie Hayakawa soon will make her masterpiece.
Title: Renoir
Festival: Cannes (Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Chie Hayakawa
Cast: Yui Suzuki, Franky Lily, Hikari Ishida, Yuumi Kawai, Ayumu Nakajima, Ryota Bando, Hana Hope
Sales agent: Goodfellas
Running time: 1 hr 56 min
