Review of 'Renoir': The calm Japanese drama sees death through the eyes of a young girl

The announcement that a film called “Renoir” at this year's Cannes Film Festival was not necessarily among those who did not look beyond the titles of the selected films. A film of the same name, a biopic of the last days of the famous French artist, played in Cannes in 2012, and it was not particularly good – and since then most of Cannes films about famous European artists (it is a real genre on the Croisette) have not been surprising.

So it is a good thing that the new “Renoir” has nothing to do with the old Renoir. Instead, it is the story of a young girl directed by the Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa, whose former title of the Cannes was the provocative, futuristic drama “Plan 75”. This film, Hayakawa's Featebüt, was premiered in Cannes' UN's determined aspect department and became a Japanese entry in the “Best International Feature Film” category at The Oscars for 2022; The follow -up, which differs dramatically in sound and subject, marks its first entry into the main competition of Cannes, a relative rarity for the second characteristic of a director.

“Renoir” is loosely on the director's own memories and is a history of age that does not take much for the knowledge or milestones of milestones. Instead, it meanders its two -hour term filled with lyrical moments that are refuted by dark underflooring. In fact, the film undercut the idea of ​​a coming-of-age film in its first sequence, in which its main character, an 11-year-old girl who visits a fifth grade in a school in the suburbs outside of Tokyo in the 1980s, is strangled and killed in sleep.

“I didn't really have the feeling that I was dead,” says the girl Fuki in an emotional voice -over walking material from her funeral. “But when I all looked sad, I was also sad.”

But this voice -over does not come from beyond the grave, but from the classroom, where she reads an essay that she wrote, which is inspired by a nightmare she had. “When I woke up, I was glad that it was a dream,” she says – although this is not the last time that the film will dare into the realm of imagination, with Fuki's living imagination in question some of her adventures on the screen.

As shown by the remarkable young actress Yoi Suzuki, Fuki is clearly a clever and talented girl, although an essay tends to have titles such as “I would like to be an orphan” and who idle through photo books from hungry African children and watch a video of crying babies. Youth and mortality dance uneasily throughout the film, with Fuki's father in the hospital in the last phases of his struggle against cancer and her mother under fire when they are too demanding and abusive for their subordinates. (She also rejects the headmaster, who is annoyed on the pathological topic of Fuki's writings and snaps into the car from a parent-teacher conference on the way home: “It is just a damned essay.))

Fuki is also fascinated by a brutally looking American who makes mentalism tricks on TV, and she tries to learn her with her father and friends herself. However, this is an episodic, extensive report on the summer summer, not one in which individual decisions come together and pay off. In an excellent example of the separation in the strict structure of the film, a sequence in which Fuki seems to have been saved from a potential children's predator just because the man's mother comes home from one week early. On the other hand, there is a film that mixes the experience of the figure with her ideas.

Even in the darkest moments, Hayakawa approaches the material with restraint and a measure of grace. And maybe this is the way to cope with a summer in the life of a child-not as a time of revelation, but as a coming-of-age story, in which the topics and the breakthroughs only become apparent years later.

Can the “Coming-of-Aage Story” label be hit on a story in which the protagonist does not really change? Fuki doesn't get as old as a few months older and no longer stays clever or less that she should start. Time passes, and Fuki remains stubborn and quiet Fuki – that is, she remains the kind of person who might grow up to make a film as stubborn and calm as “Renoir”.