Director: Neo Sora (Japan). Year of Release: 2023
A monochrome screen showing the back of a grey-haired man sitting at a grand piano. His moptop hairstyle reveals his ears which seem slightly too large. Maybe it’s just the camera angle. The music that he plays sounds slightly classical, sometimes with a Japanese tinge. It is usually in 4/4 time, nothing ostentatious. Occasionally, he raises one hand and appears to be conducting himself. The melody switches from right hand to left depending on which one he isn’t using.
Ryuichi Sakamoto was a big deal. Starting in synth pop, he moved into film scores and more classical music as he grew older. Opus, Sakamoto’s final performance, was filmed in Studio 509 of Tokyo’s NHK Broadcasting Centre six month before his death of cancer on March 28th 2023. It’s a greatest hits package which covers all aspects of his career. I know it doesn’t really matter, but it felt somehow fitting that I saw it on almost exactly the first anniversary of his death.
The staging is low key. The camera circles the room, where Sakamoto sits alone playing a Yamaha grand piano. It takes us a while to work out the topology of the room. At first the mixture of close-ups and long shots disorientate us. Slowly we recognise the natural light to his left, pouring in through a window surrounded with those weirdly shaped rectangular boxes used to aid acoustics. On his right, there is largely darkness apart from one artificial spotlight.
The camera rarely fixes enough on one viewpoint for us to be able to settle. We see Sakamoto’s long skeletal fingers easily pressing down on difficult chords. An angle poised lamp on top of his piano provides just enough light for us to be able to see his outline. The piano keys are reflected in his glasses. Sakamoto’s playing is largely undemonstrative, but at one stage he adds screws and bolts to the piano’s strings to add a more metallic sound to the piece which follows.
The film is less a concert performance than an observation of a man playing on his own, apparently unaware of the cameras. At times, Sakamoto hits a wrong note, and utters a little curse (not that I’d have noticed the error). On one occasion he says: “This is too hard. I need a break”. At these times we are slightly aware that, by the time of the recording Sakamoto had stopped giving concerts. He is ageing and weary, but is still capable of producing a stellar performance.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus has some of the feel of Skeleton Tree, Nick Cave’s fairly recent concert film. Though maybe there’s not much more to compare than two black and white films of a man playing a grand piano. There is a clear difference though, in that Cave sings throughout which encourages you to engage much more with what you are watching. Opus consists entirely of music without words, which is a far more abstract art form.
Last week-end, I saw the concert film Stop Making Sense (twice). While writing the review, I was reminded how difficult it can be to review a film of music rather than one with dialogue, even if you know the music well. Music is by its nature not full of narrative. And whereas I know much Talking Heads stuff inside out, I have little personal experience of Sakamoto’s music. For most of the time, I was listening to it for what was effectively the first time.
Reading a number of reviews, I fear that my relationship to Sakamoto is substantially different to those of some critics. One talks of youthful experiences being profoundly moved by Sakamoto’s score to Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor. Others show a knowledge of Sakamoto’s work which I’m not going to try to fake. My relationship with his music was much less personal – I was vaguely aware of it, but not to the extent that I could sing you any of his tunes.
My first experiences with Sakamoto were mundane. There was a cheap compilation album, which – alongside barely memorable songs by the Carpenters and Chris de Burgh – included Theme from The Space Invaders by Sakamoto’s group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). There were his albums with post-Japan David Sylvian, which I bought but rarely listened to. And then he appeared alongside David Bowie in Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, for which he wrote the soundtrack.
These experiences may have formed me, but they left little impact. I didn’t recognise anything played in Opus apart from the main theme from Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence (apparently it had wormed its way into my skull after all). My experience of this concert was almost entirely as an outsider who, if he’d heard any of this stuff before, certainly hadn’t let it make an impact. I read afterwards that he even played a YMO track, but I missed this while I was watching.
So, is it Any Good? To a large account, it is. It’s more that I’m ignorant of Sakamoto’s work than I have any need to hate on it. On a musical level, it’s perfectly fine. It’s more something that I’d put on as background music than listen to it assiduously, but I can well understand why people would take this sort of stuff to heart. And, besides which, the film’s strength does not just lie with the sound, but in the way in which this interacts with the visuals.
If you’re a Sakamoto fan, you may love this film, and see it as a fitting legacy to a musical innovator. The striking camerawork, by Sakamoto’s son Neo Sora, means that the experience is not just aural. There is a lot of art in the way in which the room has been arranged, and exactly how we view Sakamoto’s solo performance. For a casual observer like myself, there’s plenty to like. I guess this is as much as you should expect.
CinePhil 