“We cry when people die. Do we cry because we feel sorry for the dead? Or because we feel sorry for ourselves.”

Chie Hayakawa bursts on the international scene with her chilling sci-fi Plan 75 (2022). Her first feature-film, which earned her the Caméra d’Or – Special Mention at Cannes, tackled the theme of societal neglect, solitude, and euthanasia with a profound and shocking clarity. For her second feature film, Hayakawa returns the theme of solitude, yet approaches it in a more intimidate and more personal way.   

Hayakawa’s narrative follows Fuki Okita (Yui Suzuki), an 11-year-old girl, as she tries to deal with the effect the terminal illness of her father Keiji Okita (Lily Franky) has on the presence of her mother, Utako Okita (Hikari Ishida). Fuki, interested in the paranormal, wanders around, practising with her dad in the hospital, introducing her friend, whom she met at her English conversational class, to the wonders of mind-reading, and practising hypnosis with Kuriko Kita (Yuumi Kawai), a young widowed woman who leaves in the same apartment block.

Hayakawa opens her narrative with a dream-sequence. While Hayakawa utilizes the dream to open her narrative with neat little narrative twist, we must consider the dream, in accordance with Sigmund Freud’s theories, as a way by which the subject’s unvocalized subjective position expresses itself. In this sense, we must consider Fuki’s dream not merely as a direct elaboration of her subjective struggle with her familial Other but also as a phantasmatic frame that signals the unvocalized feelings of aggression she harbours towards herself and the Other (Psycho-note 1). 

By confronting the spectator with one of Fuki’s violent phantasmatic productions, Hayakawa makes the spectator wonder what the source of this phantasmatic violence can be. Luckily, she immediately gives the spectator an answer by showing that Fuki inhabits a space that, due to the impact of her father’s illness on familial dynamics and interactions, leaves no room for any kind of subjective expression, for any kind of subjective desire. Fuki is only called upon by her mother to help with the household – she is, to put it crudely, reduced to a simple object to support the flow of household tasks. 

Hayakawa re-emphasizes the failure of Fuki’s mother to take the subjectivity of her daughter seriously by showing how she dismisses Fuki’s homeroom teacher’s concern concerning her essay called “I’d Like To Be An Orphan”. She does not only reprimand her – “Don’t you dare kill me”, but also dismisses the idea that phantasmatic productions offer a glance at the subjectivity of her daughter – “It’s just a damn essay”. Fuki is merely spoken to – her mother’s speech, a concatenation of dismissals, order, reprimands, and avoidances – and not spoken with.

Yet, it should be evident that, by refusing to confront the subjective struggle that echoes within Fuki’s written signifiers, she also unconsciously counter-acts the mirroring effects of those signifiers. She does not merely avoid the confrontation with her daughter’s turmoil, but also evades, by dismissing the appeal-function of her fictional constructions, the need to question herself as mother (Narra-note 1).

For the spectator, it is evident that Fuki’s unvocalized struggle, her struggle to give death a place within her subjectivity, is intrinsically linked with questions concerning the mother’s desire, concerning what she is to her mother and what binds her to her father. It is the inability to ‘read’ her mother’s desire, caused by her mother’s absent presence, that puts her own position as desiring into question.  

The spectator can easily feel – thanks to Hayakawa’s elegantly structured narrative – that the continuous effacing of Fuki’s subjectivity functions as a defence mechanism to keep herself, as ego and subject, together. The mother is not framed as a bad person, but as a subject that, to protect the equilibrium of her own psyche, has become unable to perform the motherly function well – her presence is marked by distance and disaffection (Narra-note 2). To put it differently, Fuki’s mother only appears on the stage as mother to re-stabilize or restore the image of relational peace and put a halt to the emergence of subjectivity – be it hers or her daughters.      

While Hayakawa does not give the spectator any indication to how Fuki got interested in the paranormal, the narrative does evocatively indicate that Fuki unconsciously utilizes her interest to gain a grip on the riddle of her mother’s desire. She makes use of the social bonds she establishes via her paranormal interest to investigate the questions that bother her – i.e. what is a daughter to a mother and what binds husband and wife together. The element of death that wanders throughout her phantasmatic elaborations is, thus, not merely an indirect expression of the violence wandering in her unconscious, but also a phantasmatic element that radicalizes the questions that bother her – only via death will the truth of what binds a daughter to a mother and a husband to a wife materialize itself. The way the (m)Other responds to the intrusion of death will offer the subject formative indications as to how to re-fabricate an answer to the riddle of the Other’s desire.

Hayakawa utilizes Renoir to frame one of greatest contemporary ills. What emerges from her impressionistic narrative is nothing other than the societal dynamic of dwindling social bonds, the ongoing imaginarisation of interactions, and the rise in subjective solitude and social isolation should not surprise anyone. The evocative concatenation of voicemails on the line of the Telephone Dating Club is, first and foremost, utilized to emphasizes that Fuki is not alone – she is, like others, a casualty of the draining of the subjective dimension from interactions, a victim of the continuous frustration of one’s need for inter-subjective connection.

The beauty and the power of Renoir lie in Hayakawa’s creation of an exquisite narrative structure – a fluid stream of evocative sequences guided by elliptical interventions – that evocatively stages the unsaid and how it functions subjectivily. The psychological ‘depth’ of Fuki, the titular character, is evoked at the very surface of the narrative, at the level of the associative pattern of images. If Fuki is revealed within Renoir as being unable to vocalize anything from her struggle, it is because she does not grasp the questions that puzzle, yet guide her. The camera is not a ‘distant observer’, but reveals itself, as the narrative unfolds, as the voiceless unconscious guiding Fuki’s gaze – we become, in a certain sense, the effect of her unconscious.    

Chie Hayakawa handles the camera – this externalized unconscious gaze – in a way that gives the spectator time to breathe in the space Fuki wanders in, the space where her struggle to realize herself as subject plays out. The reliance on long(er) takes, dynamic as well as static, invites the spectator to carefully examine the reality of her direct social environment as well as on how she, through her presence, positions herself with respect to the others and the Other.  Hayakawa also fluidly interweaves stylistic flourishes, evocative fragments of profound visual beauty for the spectators to interpret and work-through.  

Hayakawa’s composition also features moments of shaky framing. In our view, she opts to integrate such kind of visual moments into her composition to subtly signal to the spectator that she aims to stage a narrative that approximates reality. However, the fleeting surges of documentary-like framing do not merely install a frame of reality upon which inter-subjective turmoil can resound more impactful, but also emphasizes the reality of Fuki’s subjective position, of her unvocalized inner-turmoil.

In her evocative opening sequence, Hayakawa also relies on lightning and colour to establish Fuki’s frail emotional state. The staging of the dream is marked by repeated contrasts between the darkness which reigns in the spaces where Fuki wanders in and the warm sunlight that pours into those dark spaces when a door opens. These thoughtful lightning-contrasts do not merely evoke Fuki’s depressed imprisonment – I’m passively stuck in this situation – but also emphasize that, for her, hope lies, seemingly unattainable, in the Other.

Moody musical accompaniment enters the composition generally to accompany her more impressionistic sequences (Sound-note 1). The musical pieces do not only emphasize the emotional continuity of the concatenation of fleeting impressions, but are also utilized to frame and emphasize non-diegetic and diegetic enunciations, statements to fleetingly puzzle over.      

With Renoir, Chie Hayakawa delivers an incredible moving experience that succeeds in exploring the difficulty for the subject to deal with death and the loss it introduces. With her evocative and impressionistic narrative structure, Hayakawa does not only reveal that the dimension of death/loss is intrinsically linked with the riddle of the Other’s desire for the subject, but also illustrated that what cannot be spoken about will determine the subject’s acts and signifiers. Highly recommended.   

Psycho-note 1: Let us note that the emphasis Fuki puts on the riddle of crying and feelings of sadness in her speech at school pushes the focal point of the dream to the fringes: the act of being strangled to death. Hayakawa offers, in this sense, a beautiful illustration of the fact that the subject, when recounting a dream, seeks to gloss over the fragments pregnant with subjective truth.

The subjective truth the dream stages is nothing other than the realization that the familial Other has a suffocating/strangling effect on her subjectivity – the continuous demands within the familial context erases any possibility for her to pursue her coming-into-being as subject.

Nara-note 1: The fact that Fuki is addressing the mother – making an appeal on her, is evoked very early in the narrative with the touching and evocative image of her trying to touch her mother’s back while riding together on the bicycle. 

Narra-note 2: After receiving a complaint concerning harassment and psychological oppression by a co-worker, her boss forces Fuki’s mother to follow a training program – a training combining behavioural psychology and cognitive therapy – to help people deal with their communication problems. 

Sound-note 1: Hayakawa often combines the use of music with a temporary draining of diegetic sounds. This draining, which reduces the scene to a simple association between an image and a signifier, allows Hayakawa to deliver more profound evocative effects. In the funeral scene, for instance, the concatenation of impressions is reduced to the association between crying faces (image) and the question why we cry at funerals (signifier).

In some cases, like when Kuriko Kita tells Fuki about her husband’s death, Hayakawa skips the musical accompaniment to be able to heighten the impact of crafted association between image, sound, and speech/signifier.

Cine-note 1: Hayakawa uses some slow-motion moments within her composition.