‘Renoir’ review: A grieving 11-year-old retreats into fantasy in 1980s Tokyo

Dir/scr: Chie Hayakawa. Japan/France/Singapore/Philippines/Indonesia/Qatar. 2025. 120mins

With her father sinking into the final stages of terminal cancer and her mother frazzled by stress, loneliness and work pressures, 11-year-old Fuki (Yui Suzuki) retreats so deeply into a fantasy world that it’s not always clear what is real and what isn’t. The second film from Chie Hayakawa, which is inspired by her own experience of losing her father as a child, is a picture composed of shattered fragments. Many of these jagged little vignettes are exquisitely realised, others are genuinely chilling. Whether they fully coalesce into a coherent whole is one question; whether they even need to is another. Renoir may leave questions, but it’s an elegant, thoughtful piece of filmmaking that digs into the guilt and confusion that underpins a child’s struggle to process death.

A sharp-edged, cutting examination of the emotional discord of grief and guilt

The film marks a return to Cannes for Hayakawa, whose short film Niagara was selected for the Cinéfondation section in 2014 and whose debut feature, Plan 75, played in Un Certain Regard in 2022, winning a Camera d’Or special mention. Plan 75 went on to enjoy an extensive festival run, and was Japan’s submission for the Academy Awards. Renoir is a more enigmatic work, but its selection for Cannes Competition should frame this picture as a title of interest for further festivals and risk-taking arthouse distributors.

The story takes place in 1987, in the suburbs of a Tokyo in the grip of an economic boom. Work is all-consuming for Fuki’s mother, Utako (Hikari Ishida), a supervisor at an unspecified company who is dealing with an internal complaint about her management style, on top of everything else. And even her ailing father Keiji (Lily Franky) finds it hard to let go of his work obligations. He offers unwelcome feedback on a proposal to a pair of his salaryman colleagues who have grudgingly come to the hospital to visit him. Fuki later overhears them discussing her father. “There’s no way he’s coming back,” says one. “What a relief.”

The frenzy of economic expansion has other consequences – there’s a sense of societal disconnection and alienation, which Hayakawa captures effectively through the device of a phone dating service. Messages from lonely heart Tokyoites seeking company play out over shots of the nighttime streets. All of this is observed by the watchful Fuki, who takes to phoning the message service (and finally leaving her own message) during the lonely hours while her mother is at work and her father is in hospital.

Death, not surprisingly, is a preoccupation for Fuki. The film opens with a dream sequence which imagines her own funeral, which in turn becomes a school classroom scene in which she reads from an essay about the experience: “Do we cry because we are sorry for the person who died? Or do we cry for ourselves.” It’s a question that preoccupies her. She’s a child, so events are processed by their implications for her own life rather than those of other people. Still, she is self-aware enough to realise that her reaction to her father’s suffering (she ties a ribbon to the window and does horse impersonations to alleviate the hospital room monotony) is not as deeply felt as perhaps it should be. There’s a terrrific scene towards the end of the picture between Fuki and her English teacher, in which Fuki learns the language of grief along with her conversational English.

The most challenging aspect of the film is the deliberate lack of delineation between the real and the imaginary. A brief scene on a party boat and a sequence in which Fuki hypnotises her bereaved upstairs neighbour are clearly inventions in the mind of a creative young girl. But another scene, remarkable in its mounting queasiness, in which Fuki meets with a paedophile who has groomed her over the phone chat lines, feels horribly real.

This is a picture that benefits from a little time and distance, allowing all the disparate fragments to settle into place. It’s poetic without feeling diaphanous and insubstantial, a sharp-edged, cutting examination of the emotional discord of grief and guilt.