PERFECT DAYS – Review by Jennifer Green
German director Wim Wenders’ deceptively simple, meditative, Tokyo-set Perfect Days demonstrates a masterful use of what the medium of cinema can offer. By pairing minimalist storytelling with modern settings, ambient sound with a nostalgic soundtrack, and moving images with unobtrusive dialogue and action, Wenders constructs a portrait of one man’s seemingly ordinary life that manages to both scratch away at what it means to be human and ask quintessential questions about what constitutes a life well-lived.
Perfect Days is considered a top-runner among this year’s nominees to the International Feature Film Oscar, where it is representing Japan. It competed in Cannes last May and earned star Kôji Yakusho, present in virtually every scene, a deserved Best Actor award.
Hirayama (Yakusho) cleans public toilets for a living, a profession his elegant sister bristles at (despite Tokyo’s glorious public restrooms on display here – the germ for this film was an invitation Wenders received to create a series of short films about the toilets). Hirayama is an erudite soul, his shelves stacked with books by the likes of Faulkner, Highsmith and Koda. Yet he feels no need to show this to the world and instead is a man of very few words who prefers a simple, almost monastic life, the comforts of familiarity and the satisfaction of a job exceptionally well done.
The more we learn, the more we wonder about the circumstances which might have brought this man to the modest life he’s leading. The film is structured by days. The first, the film’s initial half hour, sets up his typical routine, from awakening on his roll-up floor mat to the softly repetitive sounds of the street sweeper, through his daily rituals until he settles back into bed at night, reading by lamp until sleep overcomes him. He wears a near perpetual smile on his face, the ever-so-slight grin of someone grateful to be alive.
Each day after that, varied in length and sewn together rhythmically, picks and chooses from the first day’s set-up, showing some similar moments and adding new ones, revealing additional details about his life bit by bit. And each day ends with a montage of monochromatic images, a blend of trees and faces and places that seem to represent Hirayama’s experiences of that day as well as other, more distant memories – ethereal, dream-like sequences passing through his mind as he drifts off to sleep.
Hirayama lives a surprisingly structured existence and seems to find comfort in repetition. He eats in the same spots, buys his books from a single bookseller and takes the same route to work each day as he listens to classic rock. It’s those tunes which form the film’s soundtrack and set the mood, from The House of the Rising Sun to Dock of the Bay to Lou Reed’s Pale Blue Eyes (and, of course, Perfect Day).
Hirayama takes pleasure in leaving his restrooms spotless. No matter the task, there is beauty and spiritual reinforcement to be found in a job done to the best of one’s ability. He doesn’t seem to require any external approval, and we see progressively how interactions with others – an immature workmate, an angsty young woman, a visiting niece, his disapproving sister, a potential love interest and her terminally ill ex-husband – throw him off his routine in some way, eliciting seemingly unwanted emotions. In response to one such interaction, he buys a pack of beers and cigarettes and promptly downs the beers on a riverfront stoop, hinting perhaps at a past involving a problem with alcohol.
That might explain his need for a strict, controlled routine. Hirayama appears most content and at ease when he can go about his daily routine with no surprises, reveling in whatever nostalgia his cassette tapes bring him and seeking out new worlds and ideas in books rather than people. He takes dozens of photos of trees, which he stores in boxes dated by months. He eschews modern technologies, a contrast to the smart phone-appended young people in the movie.
Wenders and co-scripter Takuma Takasaki astutely leave us with the mystery of Hirayama’s story. We aren’t handed easy answers, a style contrary to much Hollywood fare. Instead, we’re handed clues, we’re delivered feelings, we’re shown images and we’re left to interpret on our own – explanations as elusive as the light and shadows cinematographer Franz Lustig captures. The key to Hirayama’s story, and perhaps to the meaning of life itself, is as fleeting and mysterious as a dance of leaves in the wind, a momentary reflection, a passing silhouette.
A final scene lingers on Hirayama’s face as he drives his truck once again across the matrix of Tokyo’s freeways and past the city’s omnipresent “Sky Tree” tower. “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me,” Nina Simone sings as Hirayama wavers between smiles and tears, a remarkably sensitive display of emotion from actor Yakusho which ends the film on the same hopeful yet enigmatic note on which it began.
