Tender portrait hits perfect note
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
PG cert, 100 min Dir Stephen Nomura Schible Starring Ryuichi Sakamoto
In June 2014, at the age of 62, Ryuichi Sakamoto was diagnosed with cancer. The Japanese composer had been working on new material, but the news seemed to render it obsolete – so he started afresh. If he had just one more album left in him, he reasoned, he had better make it count.
The result was async, one of his finest records. But the unusually high existential stakes of its gestation have also yielded this extraordinary companion film by Stephen Nomura Schible, which ranks only slightly below Terry Zwigoff ’s Crumb and Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams as one of the great documentaries about the creative process.
Sakamoto is best known in the UK for his film scores, beginning with Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence in 1983, and he declares early on that he wants his new music to feel cinematic – like the score for a Tarkovsky film that doesn’t exist, he explains. Indeed, Schible’s documentary stands as an immensely moving and inspiring piece of cinema in its own right, rejecting every behind-the-scenes cliché around.
And beautiful, too. Sakamoto’s field trips take the musician everywhere from a thawing glacier to a tranquil forest strewn with rusting clutter in search of sounds he can incorporate. Then it’s back in his basement studio in New York, where he patiently refines the harvested noise into music.
Aside from his cancer diagnosis, which is discussed with disarming clarity and frankness, Sakamoto’s personal life is mostly set aside. There’s little in the way of conventional biographical detail, and though his politics do come up – he’s seen speaking at an anti-nuclear demonstration in Tokyo – they serve to illustrate how an artist’s world-view shapes their work, even in the abstract.
There isn’t even a great deal of archive footage of Sakamoto’s early years in Yellow Magic Orchestra, the pioneering electronic group that influenced everything from early hip-hop to video-game chiptunes. Schible withholds the easy satisfaction of a story fully told, which compounds the sense that time is painfully short. As music documentaries go, it’s one of the quietest you’ll see – but it’ll be ringing in my soul for a long while yet.