Tatsumi (Yuya Endo) works for an organized crime group as a cleaner - responsible for disposing dead bodies whenever one inevitably turns up in the course of their dirty work. One day, he is tasked to look for stolen drug money and the trail seems to lead him to his old friend Kyoko (Nanami Kameda) and her husband. It is there where he meets Kyoko's younger sister Aoi (Kokoro Morita), an irascible, brash woman who recognizes exactly zero authority. When tragedy befalls Kyoko and her husband, Tatsumi and Aoi find themselves on the run together, where they begin to form a strange relationship.
A relatively straightforward crime revenge drama, Shoji Hiroshi's Tatsumi is nevertheless well made, buoyed by excellent performances from an ensemble cast. Yuya Endo's Tatsumi is haunted by a tragic past, a good man driven to apathy by his circumstances. He finds himself drawn to Aoi, seeing something in his deceased brother in her. Kokoro Morita matches him beat for beat in that sense, her character evolving from a seemingly incorrigible punk to someone genuinely vulnerable and understood by only a few people. Among the rest of the ensemble, of particular note is Tomoyuki Kuramoto, who plays the film's primary antagonist Ryuji - a chaotic, menacing presence whenever he turns up.
The last act of the film ruminates on the nature of revenge itself - with a closing sequence not unlike films like Rae Red's Babae at Baril (2019) yet in a different context, its ambiguity something I particularly liked.
A headless corpse floating down a river and a small hill of severed heads bookend Kubi, Takeshi Kitano's retelling of the events surrounding the Honnoji incident - a series of events where Mitsuhide Akechi, retainer to the warlord Nobunaga Oda, betrays his lord and ends the demon king's rule. It is perhaps the film's tamest image, the entire film filled with severed heads. Yet at the same time, it is not nearly as serious as Kitano's other contemporary films - in many ways the film, perhaps Kitano's last, is a satirical deadpan comedy with tongue firmly in cheek, in this case, comedy that is pitch black. Indeed, in the credits Kitano uses his comedy stage name Beat Takeshi instead of his real name.
It is perfect that Kitano chose Hideyoshi Toyotomi as his character: as a retainer with a peasant background, Hideyoshi's perspective is unique - a commoner scoffing at the absurdities of samurai nobility - and by extension, perhaps Kitano himself looking at how jidaigeki of this era is portrayed. And absurd it is, often to insane degrees - this film's version of Nobunaga Oda, played by Ryo Kase, is chaos embodied, devious, perverse, often obsessed more with various hedonistic pursuits than actually ruling the land, treating his retainers like playthings - the head severed from the body in a figurative way, the head unaware of the body's machinations.
Yet it could be argued that Kitano's avatar in this film is not merely Hideyoshi but Shinzaemon Sorori, a rakugoka associated with Hideyoshi. Here Shinzaemon is a former ninja, quitting that job and deciding to tell stories instead. In fact, near the end, he leaves the relevant battles entirely, reaching a rather unceremonious end. In fact, many of the characters of the film seem to reach their goals, only to have that attainment be pyrrhic in nature - Mitsuhide triumphs, but is later betrayed by Hideyoshi; Hideyoshi himself is triumphant, but his rule is soon ended by the next generation. Another peasant character, Mosuke, gains the status he so desperately wanted, only to reap the "benefits" of that new status as soon as it is achieved. All this can be seen as Kitano meditating on his own legacy (if he has one, at least in Kitano's view). In this case, the severed head gains a whole new meaning - in the context of the film, the severed head is a symbol of a duty completed, a success achieved. Hideyoshi (and by extension, Kitano) does not conclusively attain this. But perhaps in a moment of self reflection, Hideyoshi states that as long as he knows that his target is dead, it doesn't matter if he has a head or not. Kitano's decades-long career in the entertainment business may not end cleanly and not with whatever "ending" Kitano subconsciously thinks he needs, but he has done the work, and if Kubi does end up being his curtain call, his body of work, strange and funny and idiosyncratic, stands for itself.
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My relationship as a fan of Ryuichi Sakamoto began when I was around 12 or 13, watching the WOWOW satellite channel in my grandmother's house. In a dull moment between other dull moments, I began to hear a musical piece that moved me like few other musical pieces did. It turned out to be a commercial for Sakamoto's Playing the Orchestra, and the musical piece was Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, the iconic theme from the 1983 film of the same name. I watched Playing the Orchestra, recorded it on VCR and watched it religiously over the years until the tape broke.
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In March of this year, Ryuichi Sakamoto died after a long fight with cancer. In his final months, he recorded a concert film along with his son Neo Sora, which would prove to be his last. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus to someone like me is more than a concert film - it is a final and tender goodbye to a man whose music has influenced me for the better part of 30 years.
The production is bare, stripped down, filmed in black and white - consisting only of Sakamoto, his piano, and a number of microphones. Sakamoto himself chose 20 songs to feature in this final performance, spanning all of his years from electronica, film soundtracks, and his later experimental and minimalist works.
The first third of the film consists of piano renditions from his later works: a couple of tracks from his 2017 album async and one from his iconic 1999 album BTTB, punctuated by the haunting main theme to the 2004 film Tony Takitani. For a moment I close my eyes and find myself at a Tower Records in Canada with my aunt and grandmother, buying a copy of BTTB and Sakamoto's concert album Discord. I ask the clerk if they have a copy of 1996 in stock; she tells me that the album is sold out. I spend nights listening to those two albums repeatedly.
The middle third of the film breaks my composure immediately, beginning with Bibo no Aozora, a track from his 1995 album Smoochy, whose orchestral version was famously used in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Babel (2006). Tears began to fall from my eyes - Bibo no Aozora is perhaps my favorite of all of Sakamoto's songs. But something in this particular performance breaks me even more. Fans of Sakamoto know that in many instrumental renditions of Bibo no Aozora, there is a dissonant, improvisational segment. In this particular performance, Sakamoto struggles to find a chord he likes. He stops for a moment and tries again, He tries to squeeze out the chords he wants, but they aren't coming out. "Let's do it again," he says, but we move to another song. In many concert films there is an image of an artist at the peak of their powers, their performance perfect, iconic. But this is a concert film of an artist in his last days, exhausting his life force to will art into existence.
Bibo no Aozora is followed by another BTTB track: Aqua, the song to the iconic ending of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Monster. It's a melancholy yet hopeful piece. I gain my composure for the moment, though it cracks after reminiscing the devastating ending to that film.
After Aqua is the oldest of all the Sakamoto songs in this film: Tong Poo, a track he composed in his Yellow Magic Orchestra days. While the original track is fast and propulsive, this piano rendition is slow and elegiac. Sakamoto takes a few moments to play the opening part of this song, stops, then tries again. With the death of Sakamoto, of the three members of YMO, only Haruomi Hosono remains.
Sakamoto then goes into his greatest cinematic themes: his collaborations with controversial director Bernardo Bertolucci, themes from The Sheltering Sky (1990) and The Last Emperor (1987) and Peter Kosminsky's adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1992). These are interspersed with tracks from his later years. Of note is his piano rendition of Trioon, one of the songs he made along with German musician Alva Noto. In this rendition of Trioon, the electronica and glitches are absent: Sakamoto's piano feels so alone.
As his finale Sakamoto chooses the theme to Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and I am 12 or 13 again, watching Sakamoto for the first time, entranced by his music. And I am in my 40s, crying in a Japanese theater, saying goodbye to a friend of sorts for the last time.
Opus' encore is the song of the same name from BTTB, a lilting, melancholic tune that is my favorite track from that album. And Neo Sora decides with his last frames to show that even without the man, the music will inevitably live on.
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