IL SE PEUT QUE LA BEAUTÉ AIT RENFORCÉ NOTRE RÉSOLUTION – MASAO ADACHI

“Documentary!” exclaims someone laughing, and we don’t know if he is thrilled with
his undertaking, or if he deems comical his impossible ambition to catch hold of, to
describe and to collect a life in an hour. Perhaps both, like this swing on which a
little girl is perched, then her father, and who, at the close of day where no bird of
Minerva takes flight, opens the film with his coming-and-going out-of-focus. A to
and fro between politics and cinema, between Trotskym and Surrealism, between
armed struggle and screenplays, between Palestine, Lebanon and Japan, between
the day-before-yesterday and today, between beauty and resolve, between the art
of eating and that of being a father, such is the risky and precise life of Masao
Adachi, the monsieur with the white hair glimpsed in his delusions. And this is just
how Philippe Grandrieux, faithful to his way of doing things, decided to suggest his
portrait, with no a priori, without interrupting speech, filming him and listening to his
words without at first understanding them, framing him in a tight close-up that is
sometimes underexposed, other times overexposed, to better abandon him later
for: cherry trees in blossom, the streets of Tokyo swarming with cars and passersby,
familiar objects and lactescent celling light. And from time to time, Grandrieux lets
speak a few shots from his earlier films, from where suddenly crops up the phrase,
Genet-like, given in the title: a paradoxical program that hesitates to connect one
shore to the other. (JPR)