Ryuichi Sakamoto Opus

I count my blessings that work afforded me the opportunity to meet Ryuichi Sakamoto twice and watch two of his concerts when he toured across Asia for the release of the albums SWEET REVENGE, and 2 years later 1996.

Even though I sat face-to-face next to him in two different interviews, and watched him perform live, none of those encounters (nearly 3 decades ago) were able to make me feel the same sense of candid immediacy as this solo performance - OPUS has the ability to make the audience feel he played that piano and his music JUST FOR YOU. The film, to me, feels like it was made for both fans of Sakamoto, and people already familiar with his work and more importantly, his demeanor and the nuances to his way of play - the extreme close-ups, the cutaways to his reflection on the piano, hair, back, hands, his gestures and grimace as he plays, pause, and ponder, made to feel all the more alive by leaving in, or enhancing the vibe by integrating ambient sound in the studio into the space between each musical piece and as he performs - all of that help to place us - the audience, as if we were right there with him as he performed for that one last time... compared to all the past concert films and documentaries on Ryuichi Sakamoto, OPUS has neither a concert-hall filled with his diehard fans, nor does it delve into his almost-obsession of "Sound." Instead what the audience get is an experience of Sakamoto playing his music for you only.

Off stage, the Sakamoto I met was a quiet, observant, and slow to warm private man... until you hit a topic that interests him to unlock the guard he so comfortably is shielded by - from disliking the generic Jpop top acts of the time, to comparing 2 different Japanese authors both named Murakami (back in the 90's Sakamoto thought one was a hack, and the other "innovative, daring, and fresh" while admitting the dark topics Ryu Murakami wrote about were not to everyone's liking). Norika Sky Sora, his girlfriend at the time (whom he later married), was always nearby and the two would take cigarette breaks between interviews with their Gitanes... Sakamoto spoke about how the music industry in Japan was stuck with an old boys club arrangement, and if he had his way, music would not have to be distributed by means of just selling physical records or via the internet with the development of digital distribution technologies - there would no longer be boundaries due to geography or language differences... all that became a reality in the decade that followed, and I'm sure it made Sakamoto both happy and feel challenged at the same time. He spoke of his ambition and hope for music to have its own life, and his belief that "sounds" is both a part of, and as a proof of life itself - with OPUS, producer Norika Sora, and their son Neo, helped Ryuichi Sakamoto bid farewell without needing to say or treat this as a "Goodbye" - this sense of being in the Present, and not Past, is not what I expected as a takeaway from a concert film, even as a fan of Sakamoto's music. While some reviews here complain about the performance would have been more engaging if shown in color, in my opinion the choice of black/white allows the music itself to bring us our own unique interpretation to a spectrum of hues - as if this was his intention all along to ensure that not only his music, but also his vibe and presence, remain alive and a personal art form unique to each of us long after he's gone.