Film Review - Perfect Days (2023)

You are biking past a bridge reflecting the lights of your city twice, toward the sky and the waters below. The sun is about to dive in, and you feel bliss; everything around you is in order, exactly how it should be, and the coming moment is precisely calculated and will happen as if already had. Your day tomorrow reads in your head as an excellent rehearsal of your play. You cast a smile at this moment.

Hirayama, the lead character and face of ‘Perfect Days’, is having this moment continuously. Working as a senior public toilet cleaner, he bounces satisfaction from his meticulously arranged apartment to his all-around-equipped minivan to the high-end public toilet facilities and the peaceful park where he spends his break. For being content with his repetitive exercises, he hardly speaks. As his days pass by, we witness an enriching repetition of his daily routine (a word that sounds wrong in this context), with the assurance of a well-designed sequence of choices. It is certain that his content lies next to his commitment to value labour (he cleans public toilets with exemplary piety) and appreciates the appointed life’s ineffable beauties (he keeps a photographic diary of the sun lighting the leaves of trees). During the day, he soundtracks his routes with taped American tunes (the classics that have been narrating and routinized life till today: Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’, The Animal’s ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, Otis Redding‘s ‘(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay’), and right before he sleeps, he takes the company of William Faulkner’s earnest writings. He maintains a serene intellectuality with all his (standard or not) encounters.

Little do we know about his background, although our imagination on this part rests well on the idea of a man who long ago deviated from a normative (in social terms) life. Probably following the American influence of a neat life designated in the order of choices. Which is rather a casual matter, since his current lifestyle allows for self-reflection and a fair amount of reason and empathy. Hirayama is a contemporary Stoic, driving around the eclectic urban landscape of Tokyo, discoursing silently to an enlightened stance towards life. Day by day, shots of his actions get exponentially shortened as the generous master of narrative (Wenders) gets on it and provides us with space to contemplate. In between, short layers of analogue film-textured, Chris Marker-style snippets of Hirayama’s dreams evince his dear memories of the day that passed. Such a perfect illustration of what dreams feel like; and what a whetting of appetite for the original avant-garde moments of cinema.

You might think that that’s all to this story, but Wenders here is set to hitting groundstrokes. You must know, life is a complex thread of our thoughts and wills sitting on a Pilates ball of our history of past events and relationships. Hirayama is convincingly present, the absolute ‘Being There’, capturing the subtleties of life, rich and modest with no hint of breaking down to a psychological rag. He might seem to be utterly from another world (aka surreal), but he is not immune to the whole spectrum of the human feeling. Kôji Yakusho’s face sponges all of them—and it’s so damn luminous.

Wim Wenders has the unique ability to construct imaginative stories that feel bonnily real and visuals that hit unexplored emotional strings. His name is attached to the New German Cinema, an important note for historical reasons*, trivial when thinking about the sensory and sterling sensibility he delivers. The story of Perfect Days is easy to follow and read according to your liking, and in any way, it hits you hard.

I trust that this last remark won’t do any spoilers or raise unearthly expectations but just do justice: The final scene, a close-up of the face of Hirayama driving and experiencing the emotions his life choices pinched all at once, is magnetic and could last as long as a drive from Shibuya to Sumida ward and back.