A fascinating portal into a man that made you wish for more...
Ryuichi Sakamoto is a prolific Japanese composer that has also dabbled in so many other artistic things from writing to acting. The man’s career is a celebration of diversity in terms of the mediums he chooses to explore and the various genres of music he chooses to make. With a man as wonderfully multifaceted and open-minded as this, you’d think making a documentary about this guy would be a goldmine.
Well apparently not.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is a biographical documentary exploring the portrait of this fascinating man that seems to lack the courage to explore any deeper levels of psyche within this talented man. Directed by Stephen Nomura Schible, Coda takes you through the history of this man’s greatest achievements and his greatest passions. Schible weaves this story through with the periodic scenes of films he’s composed to mark new chapters of his lifelong love to sound.
It can be mesmerizing when it counts but after the second half, there comes a point where you get constant, and I mean constant scenes of these intimate shots of him playing or experimenting music. I mean it’s great to see someone practicing his craft and we’d be hard-pressed not to see a scene or two of this. But they lack meaning and context. They start to feel like fillers of a movie that is running out of material. Which is absurd because Sakamoto is anything but boring.
The shots of these scenes are sometimes not even focused or shot that well making me wonder what camera and what focus pullers they had in a documentary shoot where the most spontaneous moments could be cinematic gold. It bodes a feeling that the producers lacked direction and planning in uncovering content behind this talented man.
If you are a fan of Sakamoto like I am, there are still plenty of moments to enjoy, but if you are a hardcore fan, there wouldn’t be that much in this documentary that you wouldn’t already know. I would’ve loved to have seen more of his quirky and passionate personality, and what his friends and family are like. There is just that lack of the personal, intimate side to the man in this documentary.
You do get a grasp of his many interests though. From the environmental activism to the political, you do understand what this man cares in the world. The camera does follow him unequivocally for all the composing jobs that he does. There’s lovely moments of him trying to create new sounds by getting anything around the house and recording it against the battering of raindrops and the like. It’s very down-to-earth and heartfelt to see a man that loves hi job. It’s just unfortunate that this is the limit of intimacy that this documentary is willing to explore.
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda is a great documentary for anyone that doesn’t know anything about him but loves music and films. He talks about what his job’s been like through various past projects, what his philosophy is, what he likes, but it’s all stuff you could cover in an interview from 60 Minutes. You just crave for a bit more depth. The film’s abrupt ending doesn’t help either.
