by Charles Kirkland Jr.
Set in Tokyo in 1987, Renoir follows the story of eleven-year-old Fuki, a quirky and sensitive girl coping with her father’s terminal illness while navigating the turbulence of preadolescence.
With her mother overwhelmed by work and the exhausting duties of caregiving, Fuki is often left to her own devices. In her solitude, she experiments with risky behavior, calling a telephone dating agency and dabbling in mentalism, as ways to process grief and make sense of a world that feels both incomprehensible and fragile.
Written and directed by Chie Hayakawa, Renoir stars Yui Suzuki, Hikari Ishida, and Lily Franky. This marks Hayakawa’s second feature film to be showcased at the Toronto International Film Festival. Drawing deeply from her own childhood in the late 1980s, Hayakawa captures the world through Fuki’s eyes, crafting a narrative at once deeply personal and historically grounded.
Yui Suzuki delivers a remarkable debut performance as Fuki. Her portrayal is layered, quiet, and hauntingly complex, surpassing what many seasoned actors might achieve. Even though her performance often remains muted and restrained, the moments of curiosity and fleeting joy she imbues into Fuki shimmer with authenticity. Suzuki’s work ultimately becomes the heart of the film, offering a sense of wonder amid the sorrow.
Yet the strength of Suzuki’s performance highlights one of the film’s narrative shortcomings. The story begins with Fuki reflecting on death, prompted by a classmate’s funeral, which seems to promise a profound exploration of mortality and grief. However, much of the film veers instead into the rhythms of a coming-of-age drama. By the time the story returns to themes of death near its conclusion, the emotional intensity has waned, leaving viewers somewhat detached from its impact. Rather than delving into raw emotion, Renoir operates more in the realm of consciousness and memory, evoking a distant, reflective, and impressionistic quality.
The film takes its title from the reproduction of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Irène Cahen d’Anvers, which hangs in Fuki’s household. Popular in Japanese homes during the 1980s, such replicas signaled a quiet cultural admiration for Impressionism. For Hayakawa, this particular painting carries a personal resonance: it was also a gift from her own father. Within the story, it becomes a symbol of Fuki’s connection to her father, anchoring the private and the universal in a single image.
With its soft tones, atmospheric restraint, and attention to fleeting emotional detail, Renoir mirrors the Impressionist style of its namesake painter. Hayakawa crafts the difficult passage from childhood to adolescence with delicacy and restraint, offering a character portrait that feels less like a melodramatic narrative than a lived-in piece of memory. It is muted, personal, and deeply introspective, an imperfect yet absorbing meditation on loss, growth, and fleeting joy.
Grade: C
