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The twin themes of “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus” are art and mortality, and they’re twisted so tightly together that they become inextricable. Shot in black and white to match the keys of the piano, the film entirely consists of the influential Japanese musician’s final concert. One might say it was a performance for nobody; Sakamoto filmed alone in a studio, with only the crew there as audience. But it’s more correct to say it’s for us, a gift from a master.
Sakamoto’s long career covered techno-pop, scores for movies including “The Last Emperor” and “The Revenant,” and experimental and instrumental albums that stretch and play with the full range of sound. The songs he plays in “Opus” — 20 in all — span his career. For the fan, it’s an intensely moving experience.
But even for the viewer without much knowledge of Sakamoto’s work, “Opus” holds its own as the rare cinematic space for contemplation. There’s no context given, no attempt to create a narrative. Instead, the visual space is carefully filmed and the lighting manipulated to subtly shift the mood. Light and shadow are equally important. Everything from the panels on the studio wall to the inside of the piano to the leg of the stool on which the musician is perched becomes significant, all part of the performance. Sakamoto plays like a dancer, or a conductor; his hands shape the sound on the keys, but also take flight at times, as if he’s coaxing a tone out of the instrument, or himself.
Sakamoto filmed the concert over a week in September 2022. He and the film’s director — his son, Neo Sora — meticulously designed the look of the movie, including storyboards to show how the lighting would change. It is a kind of monochromatic take on the shifting of light as morning turns to afternoon, then evening. By the end, Sakamoto appears to be playing in inky blackness, with one light standing in for the moon shining over his left shoulder.
The reason for this interest in invoking the passage of time is simple: Sakamoto knew his days were numbered. In 2014, he was diagnosed with throat cancer. His recovery was documented in the 2018 film “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda,” but in 2021, he was diagnosed with rectal cancer. He died in March 2023, about six months after filming “Opus,” at age 71.
Sakamoto is, for the most part, not visibly affected in the film. Piano performance is more demanding than it might appear, but Sakamoto’s face shows, for the most part, sheer joy — an invigorated happiness at the privilege of having put these notes together, of being able to enjoy them anew. Yet at one moment about halfway into the film, he struggles to recall a certain passage, and murmurs about being exhausted. It’s briefly surprising, a sudden note of fallibility injected into what was appearing to be a perfect performance. This, we realize, is difficult, and draining — a life’s work packed into a week.
Included in the musical selections are some numbers that Sakamoto hadn’t previously performed as solo piano arrangements, including “The Wuthering Heights” (composed as the theme for the 1992 film). There are new arrangements of old songs, such as “Tong Poo,” which was first released as a single from the 1978 synthpop debut album of Sakamoto’s band, Yellow Magic Orchestra. And there are familiar favorites, especially “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” composed for the 1983 film, in which Sakamoto also starred alongside David Bowie.
But for me, the songs aren’t the point of “Opus.” The camerawork, performance, lighting and music all add up to something larger than their individual parts. One audible element is Sakamoto’s use of the pedals, which on a grand piano have different purposes, all designed to alter the life and timbre of the note.
You can hear Sakamoto’s
quiet pedaling throughout, and that made me start thinking about the relationship of time to the music itself. A piano is two kinds of instrument in one, a percussive and a stringed instrument. Small hammers strike the steel strings, causing them to reverberate, and the sound is amplified by the body of the piano. (At one point, Sakamoto manipulates some strings with small pins, causing an entirely different sound to come out of the instrument.) The length of a note is determined by how long the string is permitted to vibrate — but every note will, eventually, die off, a natural process of physics taking its course.
In a movie like “Opus,” that takes on a new meaning.
103 minutes in theaters
Sakamoto’s career stretched nearly 45 years, and its resonance is broad, echoing across genres and generations. Musicians inspired by Sakamoto’s work now make their own music. In a sense, his mind and his ear will vibrate for a long time.
Some people say that after death, you lurk around earth as a ghost until the last person to know you dies, and your memory disappears completely. That seems related to the way a piano works: Even after the finger moves off the piano key, the string thrums with fading sound until it’s stilled and forgotten. At the very end of “Opus,” the piano plays, the keys depressing in turn, but Sakamoto himself is gone. His music, it suggests, is what lives on.
The final words to appear on the screen in the film are “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis.” Art is long; life is short. For those with generational talent, one outlives the other. And art — like “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus,” and the performance in it — is what ultimately preserves the memory of the artist.