"Renoir": After "Plan 75," director Chie Hayakawa tells the story of a young girl left to her own devices in a disturbing Japan.

Three years after Plan 75 , an uplifting dystopian film , Japanese director Chie Hayakawa returns with Renoir, a very personal film, which delves into the existence of a little girl of about ten years old, hypersensitive and dreamy, left to her own devices because her father is hospitalized and her mother is often absent. In competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, Renoir is released in theaters in France on the 10th september.

1987, in the suburbs of Tokyo. Fuki, 11 years old, is alone at home, in a dark apartment. It's summer. Her father, suffering from cancer, is hospitalized. Between two hospital visits, the little girl goes about her business. Activities more or less in line with what one might expect from a child of this age. Taking out the trash at the risk of meeting the wrong people, watching a video showing a succession of crying children, responding to strangers on a telephone dating platform...

Fuki has a hypersensitivity that allows her to guess or sense things that others cannot see. She has a gift for communicating through thought, with the living, but also with the deceased.

The little girl exercises her talents by playing guessing games with her mother, her father, or even her playmate. She also offers her services to lost souls, in hypnosis sessions that open doors to the mysterious world of adults.

After imagining a Japanese society in the near future in which elderly people are encouraged to end their lives in a process regulated by the authorities, the Japanese director of 48 This time, he has made a much more personal film, inspired by his own childhood, marked by the loss of his father, who also suffered from cancer and took his life.

Although she did not intend to make an autobiographical film, the director claims to have drawn on the emotions she felt as a child : loneliness, the guilt of not feeling empathy for her father, but also "a diffuse fear" . By seeking to communicate with the invisible, Fuki seems to be seeking a way out of the incommunicability that characterizes her family and adults in general.

Between a sick father who never expresses his feelings or his fears, and a evasive mother, the little girl takes refuge in an imaginary world, to which she clings to endure the indifference of adults. Her optimism towards them, her desire to build bonds, to communicate with others, her capacity for hope are so powerful that she becomes easy prey for the deranged.

By setting its story at the end of the 1970s, 1980, the director didn't just want to anchor it in her own childhood. Japan was then in full economic development and it was also the time, according to the director, when "the nuclear family model was imposed and human relationships were becoming more superficial. It was a time when a diffuse feeling of emptiness was setting in," she explains.

The years The 1980s were also marked by Japan's opening up to the rest of the world. Chie Hayakawa remembers pestering his father to buy him a reproduction of Little Irene , the Renoir painting of which " replicas of his works could be found in many homes."

This nod to her childhood gave the film its title. "The connection with the painting or the painter goes no further," the director confides. "These reproductions had become a symbol of Japanese admiration for the West and the desire to 'catch up' with it."

The Japanese director confirms a true cinematic signature. With photography in soft tones where splashes of color stand out, refined shots in which every detail is thought out, from the sets to the characters' clothing, including the choice of the frame, always just right, the director manages to portray the suppressed feelings and relationships within this family where dramas are woven in silence, behind the seemingly smooth surface of their existence.

In the same way, she acutely highlights the deviations at work in Japanese society, in a staging which suggests rather than underlines the phenomena observed, the emotions kept in reserve by characters locked in their solitude or in their neuroses.

Young actress Yui Suzuki takes on her first major role here with rare intensity. She embodies with a mixture of fantasy, poetry and gravity this role of a little girl in search of connection, balanced between the world of childhood and that of adults, both attractive and dangerous.

To give him the reply, a figure of contemporary Japanese cinema, the actor Hikari Ishida, notably on the bill for the film by director Kore-Eda, A Family Affair , Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2018.

Genre: Drama Director: Chie Hayakawa Starring: Yui Suzuki, Lily Franky, Hikari Ishida Country: Japan Duration: 2h Exit: September 10, 2025 Distributor : Eurozoom Synopsis : Tokyo, 1987. Fuki, 11 years old, lives between a hospitalized father and an overwhelmed and absent mother. A suspended summer begins for Fuki, between solitude, strange rituals and childhood impulses. The portrait of a little girl with an extraordinary sensitivity, who seeks to connect with the living, the dead and perhaps with herself.