On March 29th 2024, a year and a day after Ryuichi Sakamoto's death, his final concert film, Opus, releases in the UK — in celebration and in mourning. The film is an almost two-hour-long black-and-white performance featuring a selection of Sakamoto's work, rearranged for piano. There is no dialogue, no introductions, and no breaks. Speaking to director Neo Sora, son of Sakamoto, ahead of the release, he explains the intention was “to try to replicate the subjective experience of a concert as best as possible through the medium of cinema.”
Sakamoto's career spans over 5 decades, innumerable genres and global achievements — including, famously, an Academy Award for his work on Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1987). A few constants are known publicly about his life — an excellent haircut, a passion for sonic experimentation, and a deep care for human dignity. None of these you can quite access in Opus, a film which is instead entirely concentrated on the power of sound to transport us to different worlds, to paint incredible pictures, of shape, and colour, and texture, while remaining in the same black and white space of Tokyo's iconic recording studio.
Sakamoto handed Sora a setlist composed of 20 pieces, and Sora broke each one down visually, in a way to accompany, but never overshadow, the music. He explains, in the case of Opus, “the images didn't necessarily have the burden to carry some kind of grand function; I think it allowed us to be free and explore a little bit more what to do with them.” While Opus maintains an unwavering focus on the figure of Sakamoto and his piano, it lets audiences in on some of the small secrets which surround him — the internal mechanism of the piano moving in response to the pressure of his fingers; his hair swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the songs, at times covering half of his face. It is this exploration of the minutiae of a performance which characterises Opus, letting us glimpse at aspects of Sakamoto's physicality, while maintaining an emotional distance — “to not have given those images any interpretable narrative, it turned out to be really important for myself, so I think everyone should bring whatever they want to to the film,” confirms Sora.
A most striking moment of exploration in the film is during Tong Poo, originally a fast, energetic song from Sakamoto's genre-defying first electronic album with his band Yellow Magic Orchestra, now slowed down to adjust for piano and for his reduced physical ability. Sora explains: “I really wanted to accentuate the rhythm, the tempo of the music through the visual language. And in doing so, I was thinking a lot about what the greatest visual pleasure that an audience gets from a film is. It is just abstract shapes of light and shadow, moving to rhythm on screen. And I was really thinking about this through films like Ballet Mécanique (1924), which is an early Dadaist film. Going really close-up makes the kind of material thing that we're shooting into abstraction. Then when we pointed the camera at the face just to make sure we captured some of the expressions, we realised that the keys were reflecting in his glasses.” This process of discovery was intrinsic to the making of Opus, and in a way an homage itself to Sakamoto's own interest in continuous experimentation. “You always have to keep your mind open, or eyes open, to find what's happening in front of you, you know. But I think that only comes from having a structure to go with,” reveals Sora.
In Opus, there's an interaction between these close-up moments that almost feel personal, and the impenetrability of Sakamoto's persona. At no point are we provided any context on his life, career, or current condition (at the time, Sakamoto was undergoing treatment for his second cancer diagnosis). This decision, simultaneously to respect Sakamoto's wishes and to truly commit to focusing on the unique force of the music, was not necessarily the direction Sora would have picked for the film: “I think I would have wanted to explore more vulnerabilities. Sakamoto, he's a really funny guy and I think his public image is definitely quite curated and pristine. But behind the scenes, he can definitely be quite goofy, he can be quite emotional; he's vulnerable and childish sometimes.”
But none of these personal snippets of Sakamoto's character transpire in Opus, and in the end, Sora is grateful for it. “Something I've been thinking a lot about” he continues, “was how I was reading a lot of obituaries, right after he passed away, both in English and in Japanese. As I read more and more of them, sometimes I would learn a lot of things that I had no idea about. I found out about different aspects of his life. But, as I read on and on, I got the sense of this person becoming more and more a stranger. I didn't really know who they were talking about. I started to feel like my own memories of him were almost being overwritten by the narrativisation of his life by other people, and so I stopped reading them. Hearing the music, I felt really glad to have not imposed any kind of verbal or traditional storytelling in the film, because I think I didn't really want somebody's rigid interpretation of a person to be the dominant thing that you take away from the film.”
So while Opus does not openly show us Sakamoto's commitments, beliefs and ideals, if you listen closely, you can hear with incredible force the emotional significance of his music – despite the different purposes, styles and worlds each piece was originally composed for. Sora elaborates, “He was a really politically active person. I think he really cared about human dignity, he really thought a lot about war and violence. Before he passed away, he saw the war on Ukraine start and he was really completely devastated by it. I think seeing what's going on in the world, in Palestine right now, I think he would have been extremely devastated by that. A lot of people, in Japan especially, criticised him for bringing politics into music.”
Sakamoto, Sora concludes, “was able to really fulfil his own dreams and talents.” His legacy, one founded in the power of music, but expanding way beyond that: “I think his music and his being very much came out of his life, his desire for people to be liberated and free and live a dignified life.” Opus bears beautiful testimony to his constellatory, explorative life, anchored by sound, intertwined with the world of global cinema and ultimately concerned with the intrinsic value of human existence.
Opus is out in UK cinemas on March 29th.
