A moving story about grief and loneliness

Anyone who thinks we are facing a biopic of the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, or his son, the filmmaker Jean Renoir, is mistaken. The impressionist style and agile brushstrokes of the former are only hinted at in the reproduction of the painting La petite Irène that the young protagonist hangs on her bedroom wall. But the Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa (Plan 75) shares with both Renoirs, father and son, a humanistic view of the world and a genuine interest in the faces and bodies of the actors (or models) she portrays. Renoir, premiered in the official competition at Cannes, is not a perfect film, but the feeling is that Hayakawa is very close to forging her own style (impressionistic, subtle, humanistic) that sets her apart and, at the same time, connects her with the cinema of other contemporary Japanese filmmakers like Koreeda or Hamaguchi.

In this sad and moving film, which addresses grief and loneliness through strategies close to autofiction, Fuki, who is only eleven years old, has to deal with her father's terminal illness and emotional distance from her mother through imaginative escapes and mournful childhood games that, at a certain point, bring very real monsters to life. The somewhat grim detour the director takes in the last third of the film is questionable, but it is all compensated for by the truly Renoir-esque way (and here we refer both to the father's painting and the son's cinema) in which she portrays the luminous face of the excellent debutant Yui Suzuki.