The action takes place in suburban Tokyo of the 1980s, a time when mobile phones and home computers barely existed, and people received most of their information from vacuum-tube televisions. Eleven-year-old Fuki (Yui Suzuki) has been murdered and everyone is crying copiously over her tragic and untimely death. Or at least that’s what it looks like at first. Is that an early flash-forward? A school assignment? A figment of Fuki’s fertile imagination? Of perhaps an allegory of her invisible role in society?
What follows for the next two hours is a highly elliptical film based on the 48-year-old filmmaker’s own childhood in Japan. Fuki’s routine consists of school, her cancer-ridden father (often attached to a hospital bed with little hope for his future), her clumsy and careless mother, a family friend whose husband watches creepy videos of children crying, a doting English-language teacher, and a telephone dating line with awkward messages from men and women seeking companionship and love. Death too is an integral part of the story, it just isn’t clear how much of it is real and how much is imagined.
Fuki’s is obsessed with wizardry and telepathy. She often watches an English-language television show with a menacing magician of sorts. He guesses the card people in the audience have pulled from a deck, and he possesses telekinetic powers. He instructs viewers to emulate his antics at home. An attentive Fuki seeks company in order to perform the tricks, a duty duly performed by her newfound friend Kuriko (Yuumi Kawai).
Don’t expect Cria Cuervos (Carlos Saura, 1976), also about the fractured mind of a child struggling with her family and her fast-changing society, and obsessed with death. Renoir lacks the quiet sombreness, the haunting script and the fine performances of the Spanish masterpiece from nearly half a century ago. And I doubt there are any political connotations. Rather than representing the collective madness of a society, Hayakawa seems to focus on the experiences of one individual (the director’s proxy).
This Japanese film takes its title from the French painter Auguste Renoir, whose painting Portrait of Mademoiselle Irene Cahen d’Anvers adorns the walls of Fuki’s residence. I have no idea whether this has a more profound significance. The cinematography of the film is elementary at best. Medium shots give a sense of proximity and informality, without instilling any particular beauty into the images. The biggest problem is the stilted acting. It is true that Japanese people have a posture a lot stiffer than Westeners, but some of the performances here are plain wooden. Lines are delivered with the spontaneity of a first-time shoplifter on trial. Even the foreign language teacher. Ironically, it is child actor Suzuki who boasts the most adult performance, anchoring viewers into an otherwise dull story.
The movie wraps with a slow-motion and cathartic dance on a boat. It looks bizarre yet strangely beautiful, both from a technical and a narrative perspective. Still, a mostly dispensable movie.
Renoir premiered in the Official Competition of the 78th Festival de Cannes, when this piece was originally written. Hayakawa won a Special Mention Award at the Camera d’Or competition in Cannes three years ago with her debut feature Plan 75. I doubt she will snatch any prizes this year. To Hayakawa’s credit, she is one of the very few female voices in Japanese cinema at present, and perhaps the only one to achieve the spotlight in a major international film festival in the past few years. Also showing in Karlovy Vary and Sarajevo.
