NZIFF: Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus

Opus is a starkly intimate, self-performed elegy capturing a dying man’s genius.

If you’ve got no truck with a film featuring little else but a man at his piano, then think again. Filmed just months before Sakamoto’s death at 72, Opus is both a moving performance by a dying man and a chance for the composer to delve into the finely nuanced notes of a lifetime’s work; a one-time-only gift to fans that conveys the depth of emotion in a body of work that prizes Satie-esque gestures of minimalism and perfectly rendered, heartbreaking melodies over the electronic pop he played with the Yellow Magic Orchestra.

Helmed by Sakamoto’s son, Neo Sora, and filmed in black and white, there’s an unexpected drama to the performance as Sakamoto occasionally gets it wrong or, exhausted, announces a brief pause to proceedings. Featuring pieces that cover the gamut of his 50-year career including fresh readings of YMO classics ‘Tong Poo’ and ‘Happy Ending’ and several of his unforgettable soundtracks – including themes from Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) and Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1987) and The Sheltering Sky (1990) – this stark but intensely intimate film is a tender, brave and honest intermingling of art as life and, inevitably, a rumination on mortality. — Gary Steel