PERFECT DAYS
(directed by Wim Wenders, 2023)
****+ (out of 5)
.
> Germany’s “other” great filmmaker (after the iconic Werner Herzog of course), is 78-year-old Wim Wenders, and like fine wine, he seems to just get better with the passing of years.
. In the wake of the pandemic, Wenders was invited to document the Tokyo Toilet Project, in which public amenities were redesigned by artists from around the world to be absolutely unique. Expecting short promotional films, they were surprised when he envisioned at the project as a narrative feature about a workman whose job it is to clean these loos once a day. Leave it to Wenders to devise such a clever way to showcase Japanese public toilets.
. I’ve been a big fan of Wim Wenders since his early classics WINGS OF DESIRE and PARIS, TEXAS. Like Herzog, he is also a maker of exceptional documentaries, like THE BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB and the 3-D dance orgasm PINA. And like Herzog, he occasionally makes bad films. (THE MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL felt strangely amateurish, for one, and HAMMETT was simply awful from beginning to end.) PERFECT DAYS is not one of them. In fact, many critics are falling over themselves to quip that with PERFECT DAYS, Wenders has crafted the perfect little film. Maybe. It’s one of those movies that grows in stature in its own wake. I seem to appreciate it more with each passing hour.
. The Japanese dialogue cowritten with screenwriter Takuma Takasaki, it tells the story of Hirayama, an ordinary man, living an ordinary life in modern Japan. Hirayama is a city dweller in bustling Tokyo. A creature of habit, Hirayama lives his life in a highly regimented way that seems to give him comfort, and perhaps, stave off unresolved demons from his past, who come a’calling later in the film. His life, judged from the outside, might look fairly bleak. Certainly, he has a low station in society, a fact his sister finds distressing amid her obvious privilege and wealth. But a human life is not always what it appears to be. Hirayama seems to feel content with his lot in life. He is the embodiment of taciturn acceptance, fully able to find pleasure, and perhaps even joy, in the mundane.
. If he is to be a toilet cleaner, Hirayama is determined to be a good toilet cleaner, taking a pride in his work one never expects from such a position. Not like he can help himself. He is a man with standards. And a man of very few words. His co-worker jokes that he doesn’t even know what Hirayama’s voice sounds like. But Koji Yakusho is not an actor who needs words to convey nuance and buckets of emotion. As Hirayama, he is in virtually every scene, and he is a big part of why this movie is so terrific. More on that later.
. His ordered life is interrupted by a series of minor encounters with others, that may not seem like much on the surface, but are actually rife with meaning and undercurrent: exchanging furtive glances with a lonely woman on a park bench, sharing his love of books with a shopkeeper or his musical obsession with a lost young woman (Patti Smith: Redondo Beach!), an unexpected visit form a niece he hasn’t seen in years, playing a remote game of tic-tac-toe with a stranger, or a game of shadow tag with a dying man.
. In what we might imagine a life of quiet desperation, Hirayama finds a constant string of moments of almost transcendent beauty. A secret artist, he takes daily photographs of the canopy above his habitual lunch spot, an oasis of nature amid the steel, glass and concrete of the city. He sits, thoughtfully munching his habitual sandwich, reveling in the interplay of light and shadow, rippling in the breeze or undulating in the rain. The Japanese have a word for this shimmering dance of light. They call it “komorebi”, and it is the predominant motif of this lovely film.
. PERFECT DAYS is slow cinema, a designation that often equates with “boring cinema”. Slow cinema is not my favorite. (I hated, hated, hated JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, the poster child for slow cinema. Hated it!) I used to have more patience with movies than I have now. Where I used to revel in realism, increasingly, I crave escape from realism- or at least, a heightened realism that helps bring order to the chaos of the world. But there is nothing heightened or exaggerated about PERFECT DAYS. It is a warm, naturalistic slice-of-life dramady packed with small moments that say so much more than they seem to on the surface. And it’s a humanist film- profoundly humanist in a beautiful way.
. As for the central performance by Koji Yakusho, it is a stunner. (The savvy jury at Cannes agreed, awarding him the Best Actor prize. The audience applauded his name in the closing credits!) He’s made tons of films in has native country, but I had only seen him in Rob Marshall’s MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA and Iñárritu’s BABEL. It spoils nothing to reveal the bliss of the final shot: a tight shot of Yakusho’s face as he drives to work, the emotional equivalent of komorebi washing over his expressive features, reflecting a rich inner life that veers from joy to sorrow with an inner logic of its own. We underestimate people if we believe their lives are anything less. And in Hirayama’s case, every shifting shadow of hope and regret is colored with acceptance. If it were up to me, Yakusho would have taken Bradley Cooper’s spot in this year’s Best Actor Oscar category. The final minute of this sublime film is a master class in screen acting, and not a syllable is uttered.
– All life is just a transitioning shuffle of nebulous komorebi, isn’t it?
*
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