Cannes 2025 – Renoir: an endless intimate drama in Japan in the 80s (critic)
For her first time in competition, the Japanese chie Hayakawa signed a personal film and withdrew in himself around a little girl confronted with the violence of the adult world.
Auguste or Jean? The painter or the filmmaker? Before discovering this Renoir From the Japanese of Chie Hayakawa presented in competition, we wondered what biopic it was. The first minutes did not help. VHS plans of crying babies on the old TV of a Tokyo living room. The heroine of the film is 11 years old, is called Fuki and is strangled in her sleep after a quarter of an hour. The action was supposed to happen in 1987. Nocturnal crime was just a nightmare immediately loading the worried position of the kid in the context. The dad is in the terminal phase of cancer, the mother still tries to breathe a little life into all of this. Bushy saved from the waters ? The Galette mill ball ? After a while we stopped looking for the Renoir to get caught up in this drama at a child’s height. A child in front of a sad adult world to die. Fuki understands, decodes, feels the contours of a life that spares nothing. Almost without a word, without being pleased too much. A small sweet monster.
The staging respects the codes of the manual of the perfect intimate drama, with its meticulous precision of the frame, its slow rhythm, its suspended looks … There is no doubt that the Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa (discovered with her previous film Plan 75) Has put a lot of herself. Born in 1976, she was also 11 years old in 87. The more the film advances in these darkness, the more we think of what Hirokazu Kore-Eda would have made such a subject. And Renoir then? In a hospital corridor is hung a reproduction of Portrait of Irene Cahen d’Antvers Painted by Auguste Renoir in 1880. Fuki moved before the melancholy that emanates from this impressionist girl asks if the artist is still alive. “” He has been dead for a long time! We retort to him. End of suspense.
Japan. From Chie Hayakawa. With: Yui Suzuki, Lily Franky … Duration: 2h. Released on September 17.
