After the success of her debut feature “Plan 75” in Cannes in 2022, Chie Hayakawa ‘s follow-up “Renoir” screens in the festival’s Main Competition, alongside 21 other titles. The film’s central figure is 11-year-old girl Fuki who lives in the suburb of Tokyo with her terminally ill father Keiji (Lily Franky) and mother Utako (Hikari Ishida), a short-fused woman plagued by guilt. Fuki becomes obsessed with death, and her fantasy runs wild with dark stories which she also puts on paper, not just in her journal but also in a school essay titled “I want to be an orphan” that shocks her caring teacher. The script penned by Hayakawa is inspired by her own childhood, but she will insist, when we sit down to talk about “Renoir”, that it isn’t biographical. “A large part of the story is fictive”, she explains.
AMP was curious to find about her interest in inter-generational dialogues, her take on death and her work with child actors when shooting sensitive scenes. The conversation took place shortly after the world premiere of the movie in Cannes.
Your first film was about the unsettling nearby future in which people aged 75+ are being authanized because the society can not take care of its long-lived population any longer. Now you turn your gaze towards the past. Why are you interested in time outside of the now?
In “Plan 75”, although the story is set up in the future, it was the contemporary Japanese society that I was portraying. It is not that I am not interesting in the now, just that in both of my movies I felt the necessity to place the stories in a specific period that happens not to be right now. “Renoir” had to be set in the 1980s because it incorporates my memories, and some really personal, deep events that marked my life. The film was inspired my by childhood, and therefore the best setting for the story.
In both of your movies you are dealing with very Japanese problems. Your debut is about a nation with small natality rate and a large number of elderly people, and in your sophomore film, you speak about solitude.
You’re correct, although that wasn’t my intention. I wanted to make a film that was more driven by emotion. It’s not about commenting on society or hoping to do something with society through the film, but to enter an intergenerational dialogue. “Renoir” is based on my emotions, and yet it is not autobiographical, and “Plan 75” although dystopian comes from my observations. So, the little girl in my current movie feels what I felt when I was about her age. Her character was written around those emotions but the majority of things seen on screen are the product of fiction. I felt this was the movie I needed to do.
Was making “Renoir” part of your inner healing process?
When I started writing the script, I wasn’t conscious of that. But as soon I started shooting, the memories came back. The process itself for me, I think, gave me a sense of solace and also a sense of forgiving myself for something that I bare no responsibility for, but that marked my life. As I mentioned, I wasn’t aware of many things that were buried in my conscience, but I did think about why I had touch upon- or portray death in my films. My father battled cancer for 10 years, which started when I was 10 years-old, and he passed when I was 20. These are the most sensitive years in every person’s life. And both “Plan 75” and “Renoir” can be read as films that speak about grief and maybe even pre-emptive grief.
How do you see those two films in conversation with each other?
It is true that death is there, whether you see it or not. I was living together with somebody who was living with death, and I think that this experience had a profound influence on me.
Where does the title “Renoir” come from? There isn’t an obvious connection to art.
I wanted a title that didn’t really have much to do with the story. This is a film about a young girl living in a niche corner of Japan, but the film is named after the renowned French painter, and I thought that would create some interesting gap. And it has obviously sparked some curiosity. On the other hand, when I showed the film for the first time in Cannes, I was told that it is very close to how an impressionist painting is created, “dotty”. Well, there are many dots to be connected. The film is full of episodes you might believe to be unrelated, but in the end they form a larger picture.
You made very interesting music choices.
When I had to make a decision about which segments of the movie would have music and which not, I just knew that I didn’t want to use the score to move the story forward. So, when Fuki was using her imagination, when she was on her own, it was the power of her mind that requires something to support those images.
I would like to address two really heavy scenes in the movie. The one turns out to be the visual version of Fuki’s school essay called “I want to be an orphan”, and the other one when she almost falls victim to a child groomer. The rest of the movie has the emotional and sensitive texture of a completely different nature.
I will start with the second scene involving the university student whom Fuki encounters. She’s a girl who’s not really given much attention by her parents, and the young man is the only one who’s actually listening to what she’s got to say, and who shows interest in her. When someone like that appears, I believe it’s natural that a young girl gravitates towards that person. Regarding the opening video, it is a nightmarish vision of a life under the constant presence of death. Girls of that stage of early puberty are very exposed to danger, in my opinion. They may not comprehend it, but they are constantly surrounded by danger. An 11-year-old is in a very precarious place, and they sometimes feel it. I wanted to capture that.
Now back to the pedophile who unmasks himself the moment Fuki visits the house. She’s taken there purely for the sake of his desire. She is able to avoid the worst case scenario, but she’s pushed out of the bubble. That act absolutely hurts her dignity. Maybe she doesn’t understand that cerebrally, but viscerally, and she feels that she’s hurting. My goal was to show that any woman’s dignity no matter her age can be hurt, and it’s important to speak about it.
To expand on the previous question, why do you opt for opening your movies with violent scenes, and then continue telling the story in a delicate way?
Even if you live a peaceful life, there is a dark hall closeby waiting to swallow you, and that is the feeling that I have been having since I was a child. We are separated from threat by a thin line, and that’s maybe why I put those things in my films.
Can you tell us something about the magical aspect in the movie? Fuki and her best friend are infatuated with a TV mesmerist and believe in the power of telepathy and hypnotism.
That had added a new layer to the story, and we must not forget that children tend to be fascinated by things like that. Their imagination is enormous, it leads them to places we don’t go to anymore in adulthood, and I want to underline that. Fuki is a kid whose curiosity and fantasy can not be separated from her character, and it’s the esoteric that helps her escape her harsh reality. In some ways, it can be healing for someone who hurts so much. That is why I included those elements in my story.
Adults are too much of realists to blindly believe in such things. Of course, there are many people who opt for such methods to make their lives a bit more bearable. One can not generalize. But all in all, that’s the major difference between kids and adults. Fuki’s father (Lily Franky), for instance, spends a lot of money because he wants to believe in a miracle cure, and the mother (Hikari Ishida) goes to palm readings.
Ishida plays a really complex role of a mother and wife stuck between real life and her desire to break lose.
She obviously feels guilty and she is sensitive, but she can’t do anything that she wants to do. That’s why she is frustrated and angry, her rage is boiling, but I didn’t want to depict her as an unbearable character. She might be imperfect, but she’s very human. That’s the mother I wanted to portray. I’m close to my mother’s age when all of it took place in 1980s, and now my kids are grown, too. My perspective towards my mother has changed since I was 11. I feel more intimate and gentle when portraying that character now.
It is nice of you that you gave her such a good-looking lover on screen.
(laughs) Yes, but then – he’s got a wife, too, and unfortunately a witness of the worst kind. It is Fuki that catches the, ‘How worse can it be’?
You are very good at creating intergenerational communication, and this is the case in both of your films. Can you tell us something about it?
It’s true that the telephone operator in “Plan 75” and the lead character who is an elderly lady enter the conversation and their encounter is a salvation in a way. Rather than a generational gap, they find a connection. In “Renoir” we have a neighbour upstairs, a widow who shares a secret with Fuki. The secret is so big that she never told it to anyone before. And now I have to mention her mother’s lover, the good-looking guy. It’s a strangely interesting relationship, a dynamic that he has with Fuki, too. In the restaurant scene, there’s a moment when their eyes lock when the mother is unpleasant to the waitress. The boyfriend and the daughter react to Utako’s rudeness at the same time. The connection is made right there. I am interested in the intricate mechanisms of human connection, when we are capable to sympathize with each other, even if it’s just a matter of seconds.
Directing children is very hard. How did you work with Yui Suzuku, and was she aware of that part with the pedophile?
It’s very hard to direct children, especially in this case in which you’re dealing with heavy-weight themes. First of all, Yui is such a natural actor that I didn’t really have to give her much direction. But the sexual predator scene I knew had to be handled with a lot of care. We had an intimacy coordinator, and we had a therapist as well. We had choreographed the whole sequence beforehand. We never did anything that they didn’t agree on doing. The young man, the other actor also needed to be cared for. Again, we had discussions with the Intimacy Coordinator. I wanted them to connect beforehand, and they’ve spent a lot of time together before the shooting. After a certain period of time they were almost like brother and sister. That’s how we started to move that soon. In terms of explanation to Yui, I had her read the screenplay once, but I didn’t really have to explain anything else. We didn’t discuss the predator in details.
