Renoir

RENOIR   ***

Chie Hayakawa

2025

IDEA:  A young girl in 1987 Japan deals in her own ways with a terminally ill father and distant mother.

BLURB:  Played by wonderful young actress Yui Suzuki with a mix of stoic inscrutability and a sense of rash, unquenchable mischief, Fuki is not your typical movie kid. When she’s not sating her morbid curiosity by watching documentaries about the bombing of Japan or listening to gruesome news reports, she’s practicing her psychic abilities, dialing a telephone dating hotline, and neighing like a horse. We understand these as character idiosyncrasies, but more significantly as the effects of a culture in which emotions, not readily demonstrated, are rerouted through unique avenues of expression. Fuki is a product of Japanese attitudes of humility and self-restraint, and she processes her grief not by crying or talking but discreetly testing the bounds of her mortality, and morality. It’s a testament to Hayakawa and Suzuki that this girl can seem at once sweet and sociopathic; that she resists sentimentality and even full comprehension is a mark of the film’s authenticity in depicting a child’s complex engagement with the world. Renoir surrounds her with other characters who are similarly adrift in their private grieving, loneliness, or disaffection and turn to unusual or aberrant means in order to cope. Hayakawa’s style is graceful and empathic, with a fluidity that finds its correlation in billowing curtains and the motif of water. She ably communicates the melancholy of transience — but also the succor of connection — her characters struggle to verbalize.