“I’m not taking anything for granted. But I know that I want to make more music. Music that I won’t be ashamed to leave behind – meaningful work.” –Ryuichi Sakamoto in the 2017 documentary Coda
When composer Ryuichi Sakamoto died on March 28 at the age of 71 – less than three months after his Yellow Magic Orchestra bandmate Yukihiro Takahashi – he left behind a rich tapestry of recordings covering a variety of genres. That includes dozens of film scores for directors the world over, including Nagisa Ōshima, Bernardo Bertolucci, Volker Schlöndorff, Pedro Almodóvar, Brian De Palma, Takashi Miike, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Tsai Ming-liang, and Hirokazu Kore-eda (for Monster, premiering at Cannes later this month). He also leaves a pair of performances – one lead, one supporting – in major international productions that benefit from his aloof yet magnetic screen presence. Even though he chose not to pursue a career in front of the camera, his place in cinema history is secure thanks to his roles in Ōshima’s Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, and the beautiful music he composed for both.
Before entering the film world, Sakamoto was one of Japan’s biggest music stars as one-third of techno-pop pioneers Yellow Magic Orchestra. Between 1978 and 1983, the group released seven top-ten albums, sold out concert venues, and toured Europe and the United States. Sakamoto was ready to break out on his own, however, when iconoclastic director Ōshima called with an offer to star in his next film. Sakamoto’s one condition was that he also be allowed to compose the score, which Ōshima readily agreed to. He even consented to Sakamoto’s request for three months to work on the music, a luxury that paid off handsomely as the main theme he came up with for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is one of his most recognizable works. “I still get asked to play it even today,” he said in a 2010 interview for the Criterion release of the film, adding that “it’s still a mystery to me why that piece alone gained such wide acceptance.”
For his acting debut, Sakamoto was cast opposite fellow musician-turned-thespian David Bowie, Tom Conti (who plays the title character), and Takeshi Kitano (a popular comedian billed only as Takeshi). He also had the added challenge of performing many of his scenes in English, but under Ōshima’s steady hand, Sakamoto rose to the occasion. Throughout, he imbues Captain Yonoi – commander of a Japanese prison camp on the island of Java in 1942 – with the sense that even he doesn’t understand his feelings for Bowie’s defiant Major Celliers, who fascinates Yonoi from the moment he lays eyes on his soon-to-be prisoner.
The way Celliers undermines Yonoi’s authority and disrupts the orderly running of the camp is echoed in Ōshima’s final film, 1999’s Gohatto a.k.a. Taboo, about the effect a staggeringly beautiful samurai has on his fellow militia recruits. In addition to reuniting the director with Kitano, who plays the militia’s strict lieutenant commander, Ōshima also brought Sakamoto on board to compose its eclectic score. By that time, with twelve other features under his belt, he was no longer the “rank beginner” he considered himself 16 years earlier.
Just ahead of its premiere in competition at Cannes, 40 years ago this month, Sakamoto released the soundtrack for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, complete with “Forbidden Colours,” a version of the main theme with lyrics and vocals by ex-Japan singer/songwriter David Sylvian. Sakamoto also recorded an album of solo piano renditions of the score, far from the last time he would revisit the material. His next opportunity to stretch himself presented itself almost immediately, however, when Ōshima introduced him to Bernardo Bertolucci at the festival and the Italian director offered him an acting role in his next film, which took a few years to come together.
As Sakamoto tells the story in Coda, producer Jeremy Thomas called him with a week’s notice to travel to China once The Last Emperor’s logistical problems were sorted out. His role: Amakasu, the head of Japan’s secret service in Manchuria, which props up deposed emperor Pu Yi to legitimize their attempt to annex the entire country. It was intended to be solely an acting gig, but two days before Bertolucci was to film a grand reception establishing Amakasu’s cover as a movie studio chief, Sakamoto was pressed into service composing a piece for the musicians to play in the scene. It came off, but it was only a warm-up. After production wrapped and Sakamoto returned home, Bertolucci asked him to score half the film to balance out the music written by David Byrne and Cong Su. Given just two weeks to compose and record his portion from scratch, Sakamoto planned on a synthesizer-based score like Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, but Bertolucci insisted on something with an orchestral sweep, which Sakamoto dutifully delivered. “Thank God I was young,” he says in Coda. “I couldn’t do that today.”
Again, the effort paid off, with Sakamoto, Byrne, and Su sharing the Academy Award for Best Original Score (among many other laurels) as part of The Last Emperor’s historic Oscars sweep. This led to more film work for Sakamoto, including two further collaborations with Bertolucci (on The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha), but he put acting aside (with the exception of a cameo in Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel). Instead, he channeled his energies into environmental activism, especially in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident. This is chronicled in Coda, which also covers his struggles after being diagnosed with stage three throat cancer in 2014. Even during the year he was supposed to be on hiatus to recuperate, he answered the call to do the music for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant. And further demonstrating his sense of social responsibility, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he live-streamed a performance entitled Playing the Piano for the Isolated, which is archived on his YouTube channel. Naturally, one of the pieces he pulled out for it was “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence.”
“Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” and “The Last Emperor” are both streaming on the Criterion Channel. “The Last Emperor” is also on HBO Max. “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda” is available to rent on iTunes and Prime Video.
