Il se peut que la beauté ait renforcé notre résolution
( Masao Adachi )

Philippe Grandrieux
2011 - 73 min - Vidéo HD - Couleur et Noir & Blanc - France

"“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."
(Jean-Pierre Rehm, FID Marseille 2011)