Perfect Days

Kōji Yakusho

Wim Wenders' Perfect Days is his most successful fictional film since Wings of Desire. I interjected the word fictional because Wenders, regardless of the ups and downs of his career as a commercial filmmaker, has always kept his hand in the game as a documentary filmmaker and that aspect of his craft is integral to Perfect Days. The film, which chronicles a week or so in the life of a Tokyo toilet cleaner, boasts extraordinary documentary sequences of life in a modern city. Footage that will only grow in stature and impact as time moves on. Wenders shoots the film, on the whole, as a poetic documentary with nary a crane or tracking shot in evidence. Working with a skeleton crew and within a tight sixteen day shooting freed up Wenders, whose work in commercial films of the past three decades has been overloaded, to offer a compelling portrait of a man unburdened by the accouterments of modern life.

Wenders' protagonist, Hirayama, lives simply and solitarily in a run down area of Tokyo. He is devoted to his job and its routine and is meticulous whether cleaning public restrooms or his own flat. He also sticks to a routine on his off hours, always dining at the same unglamorous noodle shop and frequenting the same izakaya. Hirayama does have hobbies and interests. He is a devoted reader, amateur photographer, and has a collection of music cassettes that closely resembles Wenders' taste in 1970s rock and soul. His ascetic lifestyle is balanced by the charm and coziness of Kōji Yakusho's luminous performance. Yakusho ( Shall We Dance?, 13 Assassins, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge) has perhaps the warmest and most expressive face in cinema since the death of Marcello Mastroianni. He adroitly humanizes a figure that could have come off as a bloodless archetype. Hirayama, like Camus' Sisyphus, finds joy in a burden he accepts. By making the best of his humble lot, he is truly unfettered and alive. He savors the passing parade of life and is fascinated by the play of light upon the trees, what the Japanese call komorebi.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention that this film is Wenders second tribute to the Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu, the first being 1985's Tokyo-Ga. Perfect Days has the Zen stillness of an Ozu film. The very specific images tells the story. The first ten minutes of the film has no dialogue. The audience has to focus on ambient sound and vision: traffic, the wind rustling through the trees, the sound of a street sweeper's broom, a sigh. Hirayama himself doesn't speak until an hour into the film. Wenders leavens this every grain of sand effect by providing comic relief with the presence of Hirayama's young co-worker, Takashi (Tokio Emoto). Takashi is a complete contrast to Hirayama, feckless instead of responsible, voluble instead of taciturn. Takashi is the type of person who says very little even though he is constantly talking. Takashi tries to enlist Hirayama in winning over a prospective girlfriend, Aya (Aoi Yamada), but she is out of his league and seems more interested in Hirayama's music collection than Takashi.

Yakusho and Arisa Nakano

Wenders disrupts Hirayama's routine during the second half of the film. An unexpected visit by his niece (Arisa Nakano) hints that Hirayama has been fleeing some deep seated family trauma that Wenders wisely does not overly explore. An interlude with a man facing his own mortality seems to me a too pat way to address Hirayama's shadow self. I also did not care for the ending: Hirayama tearing up listening to Nina Simone's "Feeling Good" as he drives his van to work. The scene is a nice showpiece for Yakusho, but seems to me an unnecessary exclamation point to a film that has already been an exercise in transcendent style. We have reached transcendence overkill by this point.

I don't want to leave this fine film on a down note, though. It started out as a promotional project for the Tokyo Toilet Project before morphing into a film that is very much a product of its maker. The public restrooms resulted from of a sense of social responsibility, a desire to work for the common good, that Hirayama embodies. The toilets, designed by modernist architects to help spiff up Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics, look great and there is not even a hint of effluvia in the film. This is because Wenders, who has always been fond of injecting bits of fantasy into his scenarios, is not strictly adhering to minimalistic realism in this film. He injects bits of black and white footage, mostly images of komorebi and snatches of Hirayama's day, to conjure his protagonist's unconscious state as he drifts off to sleep. Suggesting that the perfect days of the title are in the mind's eye of the beholder.