Masao Adachi is an 86-year-old Japanese film-maker and former revolutionary activist who spent almost 30 years in Lebanese exile due to his former membership of terrorist group the Japanese Red Army in the 1970s; arrested on his return to Japan, after his release from prison he returned to cinema – and has now made this intriguing chamber piece called Tôsô, or Escape, an intensely, sometimes even passionately acted piece of work, imagining the inner life of a man who was once Japan’s most wanted fugitive.
It is about the now infamous Satoshi Kirishima who, after his involvement in terrorist attacks on corporate buildings, went on the run from the police in 1975 and for decades lived as a cash-in-hand construction worker under a false name, hiding under the radar but in plain sight. He was never recognised and finally confessed his true self on his hospital deathbed in 2024, having being diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Rairu Sugita plays the young Satoshi, a long-haired, bespectacled radical whose grinning face on his police mugshot made him a national icon, and the older Satoshi is played by Kanji Furutachi. The movie, in its stylised way, gives us the moment of youth transformed to age by having young Satoshi accidentally bump into older, wizened Satoshi on a gloomy country walk and glumly cede his identity to him.
What can have been going through Satoshi’s mind all those years? The film imagines him to have embraced, with monkish asceticism, the idea of “escape” as a noble Zen vocation of inactivity. This is not simply a matter of mutely taunting authority and not betraying one’s comrades: it is an existential state of defiance, perhaps even ascending, mysteriously, to something higher than that. But what exactly? And shouldn’t Satoshi have tried to flee the country and promote the cause abroad, just as the director did?
It could be that Adachi intends the audience to remember Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who held out in the Philippine jungle from 1945 until 1974, refusing to believe the war was over. But that was a kind of quixotic, tragicomic heroism which Satoshi doesn’t quite have; his life seems more to have been a quasi-accidental embrace of stasis, as he toiled pointlessly away on construction sites. Or perhaps, in a rather pathetic way, his transcendentally inactive revolutionary existence was how he transformed the idea of contrition for those innocent lives lost in the bombings caused by his comrades.
• Escape is at the ICA, London from 16 January
