PERFECT DAYS

Watch The Trailer

Storyline (warning: spoilers)

Wim Wenders’ Zen-like Perfect Days was selected as Japan’s international feature nominee for this year’s Academy Awards, a first for a non-native filmmaker. Perfect Days expresses its maker’s artistic identity and outsider’s perspective to perfection. Wenders gives us a hero in Hirayama (Koji Yakusho, Best Actor, Cannes 2023) who lives in a modest apartment near Tokyo Skytree but exists in a world of his own. Meanwhile, his occupation as a toilet cleaner may make him sound down and out, but his workplaces are 17 public toilets in Shibuya Ward that, created by leading architects and designers, look nothing like the usual public lavatories.
Hirayama signals his apartness from the average and ordinary in other ways, from his meticulous attention to detail, such as using a hand mirror to inspect the toilets’ hidden spots, to his avocation of photographing light filtering through trees using a film camera. Yet his daily routine unfolds with a monkish, analogue sameness: He downs a can of coffee for breakfast, plays classic rock cassettes in his van as he drives to work and reads paperbacks by well-known authors in the futon before he goes to sleep. We sense early on that for all his joy, Hirayama has troubled corners in his psyche, as suggested in his black-and-white dreams. The film’s first half unfolds with Hirayama living and working in almost wordless solitude, interrupted by comic interactions with an excitable co-worker and his vampish girlfriend.
During the second half, his teenage niece casually arrives out of the blue. Intuiting that the girl has fought with her mother, his long-lost sister, Hirayama accepts her into his life, taking her on his rounds and to his neighbourhood public bath, surprising the elderly regulars. Also, Hirayama gets a jolt when he discovers the proprietor of his favourite bar in the embrace of an unfamiliar male visitor, and we realize that his feelings for her may be more than platonic. These developments threaten to take the film in all-too-familiar directions, but Wenders opts for mood over plot, the poetically suggestive and evocatively playful over the prosaically explanatory. In the silent, revelatory climax, Yakusho shows us why he won that acting award.