I won’t pretend this is a movie for everyone. You need to like modern classical music or I suspect you will find this film interminable and probably sleep inducing. But if you check that box, Opus is an intimate private piano recital in your living room. It’s a 1hr 40minute concert with nothing but Sakamoto playing on a grand piano in an otherwise empty sound stage. It’s so commanding and personal that you dare not look away lest you be rude. Filmed while Sakamoto was dying of cancer, Opus is spare, elegant, haunting and starkly beautiful. It’s also sad as hell.
There are times when Sakamoto looks like he’s willing the music to emerge and struggling to get the notes out right. There are moments of brilliance and power. And there are moments of almost divine grace. Near the end, as Sakamoto transitions from the stirring, beat of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (a piece of crystalline beauty) into a gentler line, there is a brief, inward smile.
Pleasure? Satisfaction? Joy?
It could be any or all. And why not? Many of us leave the world a slightly better place. A very few of us leave behind a vapor trail of beauty. To know that beauty follows you into the night may be the only true comfort we have for our mortality. (Criterion)