Summary
Process junkies, cinema lovers, and fans of music should all get something out of this documentary. So everyone reading this review basically.
You know his work. Ryuichi Sakamoto began his career, as a composer and actor, in Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, which should have been the first sign of great things to come. Let’s do some of the list: The Last Emperor, Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise, The Little Buddha, The Revenant, and of course, Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes.
Director Stephen Nomura Schible shot this documentary over 5 years, capturing a turning point in Sakamoto’s life. Following a cancer diagnosis, the composer decided to take a break from his gruelling schedule to focus on his wellbeing. The film starts with Sakamoto discovering a piano that survived the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima disaster, dovetailing into his social and political activism and fascination with nature.
While there’s naturally some bits of footage from the likes of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor or The Sheltering Sky, what’s most striking about this portrait of Sakamoto is just how much it manages to capture in a finite amount of space. Swinging from his early days a synth-pop pioneer in Yellow Magic Orchestra in the late 1970s/early 1980s through to his film work and solo recordings, we get a sense of what makes Sakamoto’s mind work.
It’s almost as if the documentary is structured like one of the composer’s pieces, sampling moments from Sakamoto’s life and his process of discovery. “The world is full of sounds,” he explains. “A sonic blend that is both chaotic and unified.” To that end we see the artist playing instruments in an unconventional way, wearing a bucket on his head to capture the sounds of raindrops, or journeying into the forest to get a specific sound. At an extreme, Sakamoto journeys to the Arctic to collect pure sounds, such as the reverb tiny cymbals make against an ice shelf.
At its most personal, we witness the pure joy that this process elicits from a man well into his 60s. He’ll try something out and look up excitedly at the camera, like a child to whom everything is new. It explains so much about the mind of an artist, and how he is someone who could write 45 songs in a week for The Last Emperor, or react so deeply to the perceived absence of music following 9/11.
“I’ve got to keep my fingers moving,” Sakamoto concludes, shortly following the completion of his then latest piece Solari 2017, harking back to his own reactions to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Considering the legacy of those that he admires, Sakamoto tells us that he just wants to make music “that I won’t be ashamed to leave behind.” RYUICHI SAKAMOTO: CODA definitely demonstrates that this is something he shouldn’t have to worry about.
2017 | Japan, US | DIR: Stephen Nomura Schible | CAST: Ryuichi Sakamoto | DISTRIBUTOR: HiGloss Entertainment, Sydney Film Festival (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 102 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 10 June 2018 (SFF)
