Review: "Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus" is a marvel of sound and silence

A musician rehearsing mortality in real time

Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is one of the most powerful, remarkable films I have ever seen. 

Explaining what makes it so special is a little like trying to describe My Dinner With Andre to the uninitiated. The film is so very simple, and yet it is so infinitely complex. It consists solely of Ryuichi Sakamoto – celebrated composer for films like Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and The Last Emperor, and a pioneer of electronic music as both an independent artist and a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra – sitting at his Yamaha piano, in a studio, microphones and wires crisscrossing the image, playing through some of his greatest works. There are no introductions. There is no on-screen text identifying the individual pieces until the end credits. There is no voiceover, and no spoken words of any kind until about halfway through, when Sakamoto says two things quietly in quick succession to those filming him.

Opus is just the musician playing, for about 100 minutes; nothing more or less, but somehow so much more than that brief description suggests. We watch Sakamoto’s hands work the keys. We study his face and body as he works through the music. We see the shape of the piano and, on occasion, its inner workings. Sometimes Sakamoto plays confidently and commandingly; more often he plays slowly and softly and feels his way through the music. Sometimes he makes mistakes, or tries things out a few different ways before being satisfied. There is so much emotion and humanity in all of it, and not only because Sakamoto was terminally ill while filming, and died before anyone saw the finished product. There is a lot of silence in the movie too; Sakamoto likes to pause between phrases, sometimes striking just a few brief notes before leaving a suggestive gap. The soundscape of the film inevitably intermingles with the soundscape of one’s viewing space; you will become aware of everyone else watching, no matter how quiet they try to be, and of whatever sound bleeds into the theater. It is all just as important as the sound of the piano, because Sakamoto plays in such a way that we are forced to ‘hear’ the silences. 

Director Neo Sora and cinematographer Bill Kirstein find a number of striking, sometimes playful, sometimes haunting compositions based around the shape of the piano, the reflections from its surface or from Sakamoto’s glasses, the geometric lines produced by the many microphones in conjunction with the piano’s angles and Sakamoto’s body. They play with the lighting of the studio to dynamic effect throughout, usually leaving the lights suggestively low, but sometimes extinguishing them almost entirely; the lights don’t come up in full to give us a proper view of the space until the very end. All of this is done in high-contrast black-and-white, lending the film a certain melancholic or even otherworldly atmosphere appropriate for the material. While watching, I also thought of something Orson Welles once said about his preference for shooting in black-and-white instead of color (recorded by Frank Brady in his 1989 biography):

"Color enhances the set, the scenery, the costumes, but mysteriously enough it only detracts from the actors. Today it is impossible to name one outstanding performance by an actor in a color film.”

Welles is being a bit hyperbolic here, as he was wont to do, but I’ve always thought he had a point here. Color is a whole other layer of information to process, another set of data for the eye to take in and the brain to go over; black-and-white photography focuses the mind. Opus knows what it wants us to think about – the music, the silence, Sakamoto’s body in performance. Color favors tone and variety; black-and-white focuses us on shape and texture. When the frames focuses on Sakamoto’s hands at the keys, you inevitably study their structure. They are old, and weathered, but not frail. I found myself thinking about how the bones and muscles and tendons of the human hand as it plays the piano looks kind of like the inner workings of a piano itself – strings and keys pulling and pressing in time. There are so many shapes and textures and associations like that at work in Opus, ones we would not see were the film in color.

Sakamoto’s playing is so gentle, and the film is as a whole so quiet, that Opus might well lull the viewer to sleep. I did not feel exhausted entering the theater, but even as the film moved me immensely, it also relaxed me, and I will admit to drifting away once or twice for a moment. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, or even necessarily unintentional on the part of the filmmakers. Opus is a movie about things that are fleeting: notes of music; hands pressing keys and then lifting again; sounds in the auditorium that come and go; human lives that inevitably end, including the man on screen. If the viewer slips out of consciousness for a minute and comes back, they will appreciate the next few notes more; and they’ll realize it was okay to miss a few while they were gone. It’s all of a piece. These things pass into the world and then they go away. Opus is not a film with a plot, but is a film awash in tension: life and death, black and white, and most importantly, sound and silence. The core interplay in the film is between Sakamoto striking the keys and then leaving pauses. As the film goes on, we realize he is rehearsing mortality in real time. The notes are here, and then they’re gone.

Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus is now playing in select theaters in the United States; it is distributed by Janus Films, which likely means it will be streamed on The Criterion Channel or released by The Criterion Collection in the near future.

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