Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa’s second film, Renoir, took me back for a while to Avinash Arun’s Marathi debut feature Killa (Fort, 2014) and Sumanth Bhat’s Kannada language first film Mithya. All three movies have 11-year-old protagonists who are grappling with mortality. While Killa and Mithya deal with loss—father in the former and both the parents in the latter—and the immutable changes in life that accompany the profound pain and grief, Renoir has Fuki (Yui Suzuki) coming of age while her terminally ill father Keiji (Franky Lily) moves between the hospital and the home and mother Utako (Hikari Ishida) has it tough balancing the demands of her job with being her husband’s caregiver.
While Fuki is hooked to cable TV shows on telepathy and hypnosis, she imagines her mother wants her father to either die or stay on in the hospital, but definitely not return home to add to her burdens. Meanwhile, much to Utako’s woes, Keiji has been spending his yens pointlessly on miracle healing. Things take an alarming turn as Fuki gets addicted to telephone dating lines, underscoring not just her own anxieties but of the many strangers on the other side of the calls. Her encounter with a paedophile takes one on a spooky detour, even as her encounters with a friend’s parents end up reassuring her and us that all families are eventually the same. Basically, a messed-up society. The Japan-France-Singapore-Philippines-Indonesia-Qatar co-production had its world premiere in the In Competition section of the Cannes Film Festival. Hayakawa’s debut Plan 75, about a nightmarish ageing Japan of the near future, also opened in Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section in 2022 and won a special mention. The stupefying, bizarre idea, about the old forced to opt for euthanasia to make much-needed room for the resentful young, took the world of cinema by storm.
Unlike Plan 75, in Renoir Hayakawa goes back in time to the late 80s, but both films underline her knack for poignant and elegant storytelling. Both are complex but tender, gentle and empathetic explorations of the human condition and are marked by restraint in the craft rather than needless artistic flourishes. Moreover, both are about death—enforced in one, untimely in the other, but in neither of them does the filmmaker take recourse to sentimentality or gloom.
Drawn from her own childhood experience, Renoir may not be seen as distinctly engaging, cohesive and well-rounded as Plan 75. It meanders while dealing with several story strands and movements of the plot and leaves one with a sense of uneasy open-endedness than comforting closures, more questions than answers but it still holds well because there is a veracity to emotions in Renoir when it comes to Fuki—how the impending bereavement leaves her confused, isolated and disconnected with her reality and the loved ones—perhaps consciously so—and how she escapes to fantasy to forget or make sense of the unreasonable blow. "We cry when people die. Are we sorry for ourselves or the dead?" she wonders, even as she writes a class essay on "I'd like to be an orphan", much to her teacher's dismay.
Hayakawa wins the day by casting the amazing Yui Suzuki as Fuki. She has just the perfect mix of the idiosyncratic and imaginative, innocent and vulnerable to make the inner struggles of the character strongly resonant. Franky Lily and Hikari Ishida are stoic but freaky as the devastated couple. In Hayakawa’s world, dualities are all. Urban loneliness and disconnect cut across age groups, be it the child in Renoir or the many aged folks in Plan 75. But both the films eventually also deal with solidarities, be it friends and the family in one or the community in the other. And death and life are eventually posited as two sides of the same coin, not so much about the bleak and the dark but about continuities despite the many pauses.