This Japanese movie is named after an art print a preteen girl buys her terminally ill father. This strange misdirection fits this quietly misguided film, about how that girl passes the time while her parents are too preoccupied for her. This includes some topics on the very edge of what it’s comfortable to depict, but at least Renoir never crosses the line. The trouble is that writer-director Chie Hayakawa has focused on the wrong things, meaning Renoir’s lasting impression is a sour taste in the mouth.
It’s the late 80s in Tokyo and Fuki (Yui Suzuki), who is eleven or so, is teaching herself to read minds. This is a good project because her mother Utako (Hikari Ishida) is working like crazy while her father Keiji (Franky Lily) is adjusting to the news that his cancer is terminal. Fuki has the normal narcissism and selfishness of a child, refusing to answer the door because her favourite show is on, with no idea how much pressure Utako is under. On Saturdays Fuki goes to English school where a kind teacher named Kate (Hana Hope) works hard at pulling her out of her shell, but Fuki isn’t interested. Instead she practices being able to tell what card someone has pulled out of a deck, and answers various ads of the kind that used to be in the back of magazines. Utako remembers to bring home dinner but that’s about all the parenting she is capable of at the moment. The large sense here is that the kid is very much on her own.
This is odd considering how much time Fuki cheerfully spends with Keiji in the hospital, though they are rarely shown speaking to each other. For a man who knows he won’t live (which is apparently unusual in Japanese society, which prefers to keep terminal diagnoses from patients), Keiji’s laziness as a parent is hard to describe, no matter how much denial he is in. He’s more worried about giving his colleagues the impression he’ll be back in the office soon. If he really didn’t want his daughter around he could just have barred her from his room, so the movie’s choice not to show how they pass this time together is sloppy indeed. It also means the focus on everything else Fuki has going on matches her level of denial about how sick her dad is. It’s not that Fuki doesn’t understand what’s going on, far from it. It’s just she is choosing to think about other things. Aftersun this isn’t. And while this level of denial is often seen in the real world, having the child of the family as the main character knocks the ground out from under the audience. Since we are unsure about what we’re supposed to be caring about, it’s hard to be sympathetic to Fuki’s adventures.
Those adventures can be bleak indeed, as the phone dating sequence proves. This horror is very ordinary and how more girls around the world than we like to think about learn things the hard way. What we see Fuki enduring would sink most adults, and while Ms. Hayakawa is correct not to separate it from everything else that’s going on, it’s still much too much. More importantly it’s incredibly disturbing to see a child actress doing these things, especially since our anxiety over the sequence swallows the rest of the film.
That said, Miss Suzuki is a real find as an actor, who manages to avoid precocity while keeping Fuki a real child instead of an adult stand-in. But it’s hard not to wonder why Renoir wasn’t made from Utako’s point of view. A movie about a career woman having to juggle, by herself, an unsympathetic job, a dying husband and an attention-seeking daughter would have been considerably more interesting. As it is, Renoir is a noble attempt to depict the growing pains adults prefer not to remember. Unfortunately a better movie would have delved into why.
Renoir recently played at the Cannes Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Cannes site for the title.
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