From the very first frame, Beauty invites a rigorous deconstructing. In footage stylized to resemble home movies, Adachi plays with his young daughter in a park, while his stream of consciousness narration takes stock of his life. Although poetic at times, his command of his faculties sounds spotty. Reluctant to address his revolutionary past directly, he hints at feelings of guilt, doubt, and confusion.
This is a marked contrast to the Adachi Grandrieux interviews directly. He remains a matter of fact Marxist extremist, who defiantly recognizes no distinction between art and politics. Yet, Grandrieux (surely unintentionally) undercuts his authority by slowly blurring his camera’s focus in one sequence and compulsively panning the light fixtures above Adachi in other. The only pure talking head shot is reserved for Kôji Wakamatsu (director of the even more unintentionally revealing United Red Army), his comrade in filmmaking and in arms, who praises Adachi as an “outlaw.”
To all but the most radicalized, Grandrieux’s choice of illustrative film clips from Adachi’s oeuvre will also be distancing. Rather than scenes from Wakamatsu’s riveting but relatively mainstream Caterpillar, which Adachi wrote, we see episodes of locking-and-loading, didactic propaganda voiceovers, and an apparently fatal sexual assault. At one point, Adachi bemoans the inability of 1960’s revolutionary movements to reach the common people. This is why.
Indeed, many of Grandrieux’s striking images undercut the revolutionary program. Adachi’s sweet-tempered little girl is a timely reminder there are things more important than the scientistic dialectics Adachi venerates. The images of him wandering through downtown Tokyo (a capital of capitalism) lit up brighter than Times Square at night amid throngs of energetic young people is also probably not intended to look so appealing. Indeed, Adachi resembles a ghost surrounded by life in full bloom.
