“A film that at once offers too little and too much in terms of its protagonist’s story, and comes up short in delivering an emotional punch.”

After the intriguing premise of her 2022 debut Plan 75 in which she focused on an aging population, Japanese director Chie Hayakawa skews younger and more traditional for her follow-up Renoir, the coming-of-age story of an 11-year-old girl in 1980s Tokyo trying to navigate a world of troubled adults. Landing a Competition berth will undoubtedly invite more scrutiny of the film (her debut screened in the Un Certain Regard sidebar and received a Camera d’Or Special Mention). While Renoir is engaging enough and audiences will be charmed by its protagonist (played by newcomer Yui Suzuki), the film is too fragmented and too much a reflection via its central character on the lives of those around her to survive a more thorough examination completely unscathed. A quiet melodrama that recalls the work of more accomplished masters like Hirokazu Koreeda, Renoir doesn’t convince quite enough to justify Hayakawa’s promotion to the Cannes pantheon, but its ruminations on grief and the power of imagination should satisfy audiences drawn to this type of cinema.

Through various circumstances young Fuki (Suzuki) is often left to her own devices. Her father is in hospital getting cancer treatments, and her mother has her hands full with a demanding management job that she doesn’t want to fail at. Fuki develops an interest in telepathy, trying to read her classmate’s mind, and lets her imagination run wild in essays with titles such as “I’d like to be an orphan.” Her happiest moments are when she visits her father, the only adult who meets her at her level; others ignore her, but she is at that age when you start figuring out how the world works. The marital problems of her parents do not escape her, and she picks up on the affair her mother starts with a management training instructor. The mother-daughter relationship is already strained, as Fuki also senses that her mother is planning for life after Fuki’s father dies.

And so the film drifts along from scene to scene, barely developing its lead character. She is the canvas upon which Hayakawa paints her other characters, in particular Fuki’s parents. This works to a certain extent, but once the film moves away from the family nucleus, characters the girl interacts with become less integral parts of the story and more like side quests for Fuki. Her best friend and the girl’s mother have some connection to the story, but when Fuki finds an ad for ‘phone dating’ and through this decidedly ’80s activity comes into contact with a college student with dark intentions, one has to wonder what this has to do with the central throughline of the three-way relationship between Fuki and her parents. The more scenes like these are introduced, the more scattershot Renoir becomes, hampering significant development in the young protagonist. While rationally she should experience growth through the drama surrounding her family, that growth is only shown in bits and pieces.

While narratively Renoir leaves a lot to be desired, Hayakawa’s formal chops are firmly in place. Her compositions, paired with Hideho Urata’s excellent cinematography, give the film a calmness that almost overcomes the choppy editing and disjointed story. Although some scenes, in particular in the introductory first act, could have been given more room to breathe, Renoir is not an unpleasant watch. Fine performances by Lily Franky and Hikari Ishida as Fuki’s parents give the film the emotional heft that Suzuki’s character can’t bring from the way she is written. A sophomore effort that is somewhat of a step down from Hayakawa’s debut, Renoir is a film that at once offers too little and too much in terms of its protagonist’s story, and comes up short in delivering an emotional punch.