In the lobby of the hospital where her father is receiving treatment, 11-year-old Fuki Okita (Yui Suzuki) pauses in front of a painting. It’s Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s portrait of a girl in a blue dress, Irene Cahen d’Anvers—captured forever in her youth, untouched by time or death. The connection is not explained, but it hovers over Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir: a film about a child trying to freeze the inevitable, the way we might stare at a canvas and will it not to change.
Hayakawa’s debut, Plan 75, examined aging and mortality through the lens of a dystopian bureaucracy. Conversely, her follow-up looks at death from the other end of the age spectrum. The year is 1987, and Fuki’s father (Lily Franky) is dying of cancer. Their relationship, at least from the young girl’s perspective, is tender in its everydayness. She shows him a magic trick she saw on TV, hoping for approval, only to have her gentle request to play it once more brushed aside. He’s alive but already slipping away, and she knows it. Her mother (Hikari Ishida), by contrast, is an enigma. Hayakawa deliberately films from Fuki’s vantage point, keeping the mother at a distance—partly present, partly absent, juggling familial duty with a hunger for personal freedom.
Renoir’s thematic through-line is death, though refracted this time through the eyes of a child who refuses to confront it head-on. Despite the gloom of its premise, the film is not a conventional story of mourning. Instead, Hayakawa concerns herself with how a child bends time, looking for side doors around grief.
Where most films might follow the stages of grief, Renoir takes another route. Fuki doesn’t cry, lash out, or sit in silence. On the contrary, she suspends her grief altogether, throwing herself into odd encounters and borrowed experiences. Picking up new hobbies, whether to while away the time or to find a distraction—or both—she comforts a widow who unearths painful secrets about her late husband. She dials into a dating hotline, engaging with people whose loneliness brushes against danger. These episodes may seem like detours, but they form a pattern: Fuki is testing out the world beyond her father’s shadow, while postponing the unbearable heartbreak she knows is coming.
This structure is both Renoir’s strength and its limitation. Hayakawa’s glacial pacing is deliberate to the point of daring, stretching scenes until the audience must simply sit with them. Sometimes this captures the suspended quality of childhood summers and hospital visits, where clocks seem to stall. At other times, it drifts, pulling focus away from Fuki’s emotional core. The subplot involving her mother’s attempts at a dalliance with a younger man feels more like a reflection of adult disappointment and sorrow than a window into Fuki’s own.
Where Plan 75 was taut and sharply constructed, Renoir is built on atmosphere and fragments, and thus more prone to digressions. Hideho Urata’s cinematography bathes the film in the muted glow of a Japanese summer: the way light spills across tatami, the cicadas, the damp air, the worn interiors that hold both comfort and claustrophobia. The film is almost tactile: you can sense the summer humidity pressing on Fuki’s skin. There’s also a hint of Kore-eda in the attention to quotidian gestures—a parent’s tired smile, the hush of a shared meal—though Hayakawa is less interested in warmth than in the peculiar detours of a restless child.
At the center of it all is Yui Suzuki. Starring in her first leading role, she possesses a natural screen presence, shifting from playfulness to guardedness without ever tipping into precocity. Suzuki doesn’t “perform grief” so much as circle around it, embodying a character who is still deciding how to feel. Her face carries the weight of the film, even when the narrative meanders.
The title, too, carries a weight. Why Renoir? On one level, it’s simply the painting in the hospital, the image that seizes Fuki’s attention. But I feel like it also speaks to what Fuki is chasing: permanence, the fantasy that life can be captured and preserved like brushstrokes on a canvas. Renoir’s Irene is frozen in childhood; Fuki knows hers will not last. The painting becomes a private anchor, a reminder that time can be stopped—at least in art, if not in life.
Renoir is not without frustrations. Its length and scattered subplots occasionally sap momentum, and the film sometimes risks aestheticizing grief rather than illuminating it. Yet there’s honesty in its roundabout approach. Hayakawa understands that children don’t grieve in neat arcs. They sidestep, they explore, they chase experiences that don’t add up until much later.
By the time the film closes, it hasn’t delivered a cathartic release. Even so, Hayakawa’s coming-of-age leaves behind something subtler: the impression of a summer where life and death pressed against each other, and a girl who tried to make space for both. Like the painting that lends the film its name, Renoir holds a moment still—not perfect, not eternal, but enough to remember.
