Returning to Cannes Film Festival a few years after her acclaimed feature debut Plan 75, Chie Hayakawa debuted her Tokyo-set period drama Renoir in the competition last summer. Picked up by Film Movement, it’ll now roll out this summer. Ahead of a theatrical release beginning on May 29 at IFC Center, we’re pleased to exclusively debut the U.S. trailer.
Here’s the synopsis: “Suburban Tokyo, 1987. Imaginative eleven-year-old Fuki begins her summer break lonely and adrift – her kind, terminally ill father has landed once again in the hospital and her mother, distracted by the inevitability of his diagnosis, hasn’t much time for her daughter. Fuki responds to the situation not with tears but with placid curiosity about the prospect of death – becoming fascinated by the occult and experimenting with hypnotism. As the summer passes, Fuki encounters a string of lonely, imperfect adults, all of whom nudge her closer to an emotional truth she isn’t quite ready to name yet.”
Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “With all its quotidian detail (shot in gorgeous, faded colors by DP Hideho Urata), the appearance of veteran actor Lily Franky, and glacial pace, Renoir is a coming-of-age story that will be familiar to fans of Hirokazu Kore-eda, but there’s little (if any) of his sentimentality here. Hayakawa’s gaze is as consistent as it is observant, presenting the joys and perils of a formative summer in equal light. The story follows Fuki (Yui Suzuki), an introverted 11-year-old doing her best to feel through adolescence. Her father (Franky) is stuck in a hospital bed with cancer while her mother, Utako (Hikari Ishida), stresses over work. Often left to her own devices, Fuki retreats into her imagination and takes an interest in hypnosis, which she practices on a woman upstairs and a new friend from her language school. The film is set in 1987, during Japan’s economic bubble, and reflects some of Hayakawa’s own experience of losing her father at a similar age.”
See the trailer below.