"Renoir" by Hayakawa Chie, attracting worldwide attention, with unwavering aesthetics and ethics running throughout the entire film

*This article touches on the core of the story, so please be careful if you have not seen the movie.

Index

• About director Hayakawa Chie's touch and impressionist paintings -- what is the "reason" hidden in the title "Renoir"?
• From "PLAN 75" to "Renoir" -- "Death" as a way to reexamine life
• Another film starring rising star Suzuki Yui - its connection to "Touch" directed by Takada Kyosuke
• A film that pays great respect to the work of the great director Shinji Somai, "Moving."

About director Hayakawa Chie's touch and impressionist paintings -- what is the "reason" hidden in the title "Renoir"?

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Renoir, director Chie Hayakawa's second feature film, will be the only Japanese film officially entered in the competition section of the 78th Cannes Film Festival in 2025. This marks Hayakawa's third appearance at Cannes, following her short film Niagara (2014/PFF Award 2014 Grand Prix winner), which was selected for the Cinéfondation section for student films, and her debut feature film PLAN 75 (2022), which was awarded the Camera d'Or Special Mention for new directors. She is truly one of the up-and-coming cineastes attracting the world's attention.

The main character of this film is an 11-year-old girl, Fuki Okita (Yui Suzuki). The story depicts a summer through the eyes of Fuki, who grows up feeling lonely and conflicted under the care of her father, Keiji (Lily Franky), who is ill and has only a short time left to live, and her mother, Utako (Hikari Ishida), who is busy with work and housework.

The time period in which the film is set is not directly stated in the film, but in previously published interviews and other articles, Director Hayakawa has revealed that she began making the film from fragments of very personal memories and images from her childhood.

"Although it's not a biography of myself, I think a lot of my own memories are projected into it," Hayakawa said. "I've always remembered the sense of discomfort and uneasiness I felt as a child, and I've always wanted to make a film about it." (From an interview with director Hayakawa. From the article "Tatsuta Atsuko's Cannes Film Festival 2025 #11," published on FIGARO.jp on June 6, 2025.)

So... I apologize for this ramshackle interpretation, but if we do a simple calculation based on director Hayakawa's profile, which states that he was born in 1976, we can deduce that "Renoir" is set in the suburbs around 1987 (location filming was mainly done in Gifu, but also in Chiba and Kanagawa). This was right when the bubble economy was starting to take hold. From a child's perspective, economic vitality and excitement seem like a distant sight, but the frenzy of adults who had achieved hierarchical affluence can be sensed in the background throughout the film.

"Renoir" © 2025 "RENOIR" Production Committee / International Partners

On the other hand, like a true story, limiting the scope too much to a specific decade would stray from the film's intent. For example, whether it's the YMO's "Ride On" (a 1980 hit that peaked at #15 on the Oricon charts) that plays during the campfire scene, the foreign psychics that populated primetime TV shows, the murder of a young boy's parents that was shown on the news (a symbolic nod to the Kanagawa Metal Bat Murder of Parents by a Ronin student that occurred in 1980 against the backdrop of the high school entrance exam wars), or the original dating service "Message Dial" (launched by NTT in 1986) that Fuki tries out out of curiosity, I think it's appropriate to think of the film's unique worldview as being woven together from the diverse collection of memories of a single filmmaker.

In fact, according to Director Hayakawa, the title "Renoir" is not deeply connected to the story, as "I wanted to create a film that was as far removed from rationalization and explanation as possible" (from an official interview). If I had to say, I would say that Impressionist paintings were popular in Japan in the 1980s, and replicas were often sold—Hayakawa explains this as a "post-hoc reason" that symbolizes the mood of the time and a superficial yearning for the West. In the film, Fuki catches sight of Auguste Renoir's famous statue of a young girl, "The Little Irene" (1880), in the lobby of the hospital where her father, Keiji, is hospitalized. However, many viewers captivated by this film may take this as an important motif. As was apparently pointed out at Cannes, the narrative and direction of "Renoir" emphasize the subtlety of pointillism. The work delicately captures soft natural light, momentary atmospheres, and the passing of time, blurring the contours while creating a colorful world woven from the artist's subjective perspective of "how it looked," and is certainly reminiscent of Impressionist painting, which emerged in France in the late 19th century.

From "PLAN75" to "Renoir" -- "Death" as a way to reexamine life