Cannes Film Festival: Renoir, Portrait of a Crying Little Girl

A new entrant in the competition, Chie Hayakawa is no stranger to the Croisette. The Japanese director's first feature film, Plan 75 , left the 2022 Cannes Film Festival with a special mention from the Caméra d'Or jury. A chilling dystopia, Plan 75 imagined a policy of euthanasia in the near future, with the establishment of a death market for seniors over 75, burdens in a youthful and capitalist society with unashamed cynicism. Renoir , in the running for the Palme d'Or, is not so easily summed up.

It's easier to say what Renoir isn't than what he truly is. This isn't a biopic of the painter Auguste or his filmmaker son, Jean—French director Gilles Bourdos did that with Michel Bouquet about ten years ago. There is indeed an allusion to Renoir, through a reproduction of Little Irene, a portrait of Irene Cahen of Antwerp, painted in 1880. Fuki resembles him, a sad-eyed little girl in Tokyo in the late 1980s. Her father, terminally ill with cancer, is in the hospital. Her mother, recently promoted to team leader at her job, is overwhelmed and doesn't take the time to take care of her daughter.

Fuki has morbid thoughts. She dreams of being strangled in her sleep or writes in an essay that she wishes she were an orphan. She befriends a classmate, tries hypnosis, telepathy, spiritualism, all those rituals that allow beings, living or dead, to communicate. Fuki's summer is the season of a long vacation, that of an uninhabited home and a life without ties. A phone voicemail puts her in touch with solitudes other than her own. A young man with the manners of a pedophile invites her into his home and brushes her teeth to chase away her bad breath. Television—social media didn't exist in the 1980s—pours out sordid news stories, rumors of an anxious and violent society. A son stabbed his parents to death because they deprived him of pocket money due to a poor report card.

Renoir has the air of a Kore-eda film. The heavenly green of childhood love tends towards black. As with the author of A Family Affair , the adults are lacking. Less here because they are immature than on the verge of death or absent. But to Kore-eda's clear and straight line, Hayakawa prefers sinuosities, at the risk of misleading the viewer. Renoir moves when he stops wanting to be strange. The most touching sequences are the simplest. They are those that show Fuki and her father walking outside the hospital, notably at the racetrack. Alone in the rain, her father comes to get Fuki and carries her on his back. Dream or reality, the status of images in Hayakawa's work is undecided. Renoir opens with archives of crying children and closes with young people dancing on the deck of a boat.