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‘Renoir’ Review: Scenes From a 1980s Japanese Girlhood Coalesce Into a Breezy But Moving Drama
'Plan 75' director Chie Hayakawa delivers an impressionistic story of an inquisitive girl's summer of life, death and amateur parapsychology.
Absent that film’s hooky high concept (a government-backed euthanasia incentive program for seniors aged 75), Hayakawa’s follow-up brings her thoughtful, airy aesthetic to bear on a looser, less structured story, this time about valuing and respecting the eccentricities of youth. “ Renoir ” is a more diffuse yet in some ways more interesting sophomore feature, that follows where its lovely, mercurial central character leads and, taking a cue from the painter of the (rather tangential) title, lets the brushstrokes show to deliver a firsthand impression of growing up in 1980s Japan. And so a day spent in the orbit of pedophile, or the afternoon she and her mother go to clear out her father’s now-vacant room at the hospital, or the story the young widow tells about the ugly revelations about her deceased husband (involving a deeply eerie VHS tape of crying children which with Hayakawa rather incongruously elects to open her film) are considered with the same magpie curiosity as any of the more benign incidents and encounters that make up the mosaic of Fuki’s summer.
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