The Ugly One

Winter, Beirut. On a beach littered with cans washed up from the sea, Lili and Michel meet. Or perhaps they
know each other from before… As they struggle to piece together the fragments of an uncertain past, memories
emerge: an act of terrorism, an explosion and the disappearance of a child, Elena.
Woven throughout these fragments is the deep voice of a Japanese narrator who recounts his own experience of
a weeping Beirut, and his 27 clandestine years fighting alongside the Palestinians as a member of the Japanese
Red Army. His voiceover shapes Michel and Lili’s story, their fate dictated by the enigma created for them by this
narrator who turns out to be legendary Japanese New Wave filmmaker Masao Adachi.
Set adrift, Michel and Lili search for themselves, navigating a sea delineated by the memories of Adachi the “ex-
terrorist,” the screenplay he is spelling out for them, and the camera of the French director, Éric Baudelaire,
whose film breaks away from the narrative instructions dispatched by Adachi from Tokyo.