Latest news with #ShinjiSomai
Japan Times
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Japan Times
‘Renoir': An impressionistic portrait of grief and girlhood
Screened in the main competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, Chie Hayakawa's second feature, 'Renoir,' is rather unlike her first, 2022's 'Plan 75,' which also premiered at Cannes and became a favorite on the festival circuit. In contrast to the earlier film's clear concept — the elderly are encouraged to sign up for state-sponsored euthanasia in a near-future Japan — the movingly impressionistic 'Renoir' is a loosely plotted journey through the life and mind (including the vivid dreams) of an 11-year-old girl (talented newcomer Yui Suzuki) as her father succumbs to terminal cancer. In scripting and directing 'Renoir,' Hayakawa drew on memories of her own father's death from cancer when she was her protagonist's age and the film feels deeply rooted in the characters' pasts and intensely alive to their present moment. One parallel is the 1993 Shinji Somai masterpiece 'Moving,' which also features a strong-willed girl (Tomoko Tabata) dealing with a family crisis — in her case, her parents' divorce. Similar to Somai and Hirokazu Kore-eda, another master director famed for his work with young actors (see Suzu Hirose in his 2015 'Our Little Sister' for a pertinent example), Hayakawa draws out a performance from Suzuki that is true to her character's stubbornly individual nature while feeling natural and unforced. And like Tabata, who later went on to a flourishing career, Suzuki is a riveting on-screen presence, even when her character, Fuki, is silently observing the adults around her with a hard-to-read expression and distanced air. This attitude may impress as coldness, as if she hardly cares whether her father Keiji (Lily Franky), who looks frail and elderly, lives or dies. But the blank looks, we come to understand, are a sort of coping mechanism, as is Fuki's interest in psychic and mystic powers, from mind reading to magic spells (with failures by her and others serving as moments of mild comic relief). Although her mother, Utako (Hikari Ishida), is a busy career woman who seems to regard Keiji's illness and Fuki's presence as burdens, when we catch glimpses of earlier, happier times, we realize that Utako is not an ogre. Instead, she's trying to function in the face of overwhelming stress and, as Ishida's heartfelt performance reveals, deserves sympathy. The story, which unfolds in the summer of 1987, when Japan's bubble economy was at its height and digital distractions were nowhere to be found, is more a succession of incidents than a tightly woven narrative, but its development is not scattershot. Rather, its portrait of Fuki and her parents is cumulative in its power. There is also an undeniable sadness and darkness to it: Fuki becomes close to a classmate — a tall girl who shares her fascination with the supernatural — but their friendship does not last. Utako, on company orders, joins a therapy group, but the understanding leader turns out to have ulterior motives. Keiji tries to maintain his ties to his company from his sick bed, but his colleagues view him as a man of the past. 'Renoir,' however, does not descend to miserabilist drama. Like an 1880 painting by the title artist — a portrait of a girl whose cheap reproduction becomes Fuki's prized possession — it also glows with a youthful beauty and light. And we eventually see a smile from our protagonist that is not in a dream. Death hurts, but her life continues — and hope endures.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Fire Of Wind:' Locarno & NYFF Title From Marta Mateus Lands North American Distribution Via Cinema Guild
EXCLUSIVE: Cinema Guild has picked up North American distribution rights to Fire Of Wind, the latest feature from Portuguese filmmaker Marta Mateus. Fire Of Wind debuted at last year's Locarno Film Festival and had its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival. The film was produced by Mateus and Pedro Costa of Clarão Companhia, in collaboration with Fabrice Aragno of Casa Azul Films and Richard Copans of Les Films d'Ici. Cinema Guild will release the film in theaters in 2025. More from Deadline Cinema Guild Acquires North American Rights To Restored Prints Of Shinji Somai Classics 'The Friends' & 'Love Hotel' Films Of Pioneering Portuguese Director João César Monteiro To Receive 4K Restorations, Cinema Guild Lands North American Rights 'Richland:' Irene Lusztig's Tribeca Competition Doc About America's Nuclear Weapons Program Lands Domestic Release Via Cinema Guild Set in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal, where Mateus was raised, a peasant community of grape-pickers become agents in an open-air ritual of remembrance and rebellion. The synopsis reads: It's harvest time and there's discontent in the fields. Soraia, a young girl, cuts herself. Blood mixes with wine. A black bull is on the loose and the laborers must scramble for shelter up in the oak trees. As the specter of the beast looms below, they share bread and wine, memories and dreams, the history of the landscape, and struggles past and present. We enter a long night, where nature also speaks. The fiery wind that brings the heatwave, is burning. The deal was negotiated by Peter Kelly and Edward McCarry of Cinema Guild with Clarão Companhia. 'Mateus is a rare filmmaker, one whose deep sense of form, language, gesture, and poetry is inseparable from her political commitment to the working class of her home region,' McCarry said in a statement. 'Her first feature heralds an essential vision in contemporary film. We are very proud to be releasing it in the cinema.' Cinema Guild's other upcoming releases include Matías Piñeiro's You Burn Me, Shinji Somai's Love Hotel, Hong Sangsoo's By the Stream and What Does That Nature Say to You, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich's The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, and the films of João César Monteiro. Recent past releases include Hong Sangsoo's A Traveler's Needs and Somai's Moving. Best of Deadline How Jon Gries' Return To 'The White Lotus' Could Shape Season 3 Which Colleen Hoover Books Are Becoming Movies? 'Verity,' 'Reminders Of Him' & 'Regretting You' Will Join 'It Ends With Us' 'The White Lotus' Season 3 Release Schedule: When Do New Episodes Arrive On Max?
