Perfect Days

Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days is a lovely film, though viewers waiting for something to “happen” will miss the movie. At the very end, Wenders puts up text reading “Komorebi is the Japanese word for the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. It only exists once, at that moment.” The protagonist, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), often takes photos of a tree in a shrine on his ancient analog camera. The good photos he saves in metal boxes marked with the date. Hirayama is exquisitely regimented in his work — he cleans public toilets — and in his life. 

Perfect Days, set largely in the Shibuya ward of Tokyo, seems to exist in the same universe as Ozu and Mizoguchi and the series Midnight Diner. It is becalmed, though informed by past trauma as well as emotional mess held at arm’s length by Hirayama and, to some extent, by the movie. Wenders, who cowrote the script with Takuma Takasaki, finds considerable beauty in Hirayama’s routine. Hirayama is awakened by, or awakens in tandem with, the sounds of an old lady sweeping the sidewalk. He gets up, performs his morning wash-up, climbs into his jumpsuit, gets his keys and some change for the vending machine outside, buys a coffee soda, pops in a music cassette (the songs are sublime, from Lou Reed to Patti Smith to Otis Redding), and drives around to various locations, tidying the Tokyo Toilet facilities. 

The Tokyo Toilet project designed restrooms to be “as much art as public utility,” and they seem to be respected as such; Hirayama never has to contend with any heinous messes that we can see. Some would consider Hirayama simply a cleaner of bathrooms; others might regard him as a maintenance person for art installations. Either way, he takes his work with the utmost seriousness, something his younger partner can’t understand. As Thomas Carlyle (paraphrasing Ecclesiastes) wrote: “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.” So Hirayama does. He has his photos and his books (he’s trying to get through Faulkner) and his music, so he has an aesthetic consciousness. Regardless of the toilets’ lofty intentions, though, they are still places where people go to relieve themselves, and those places need to be kept clean.

Hirayama leads a simple life. During the course of the movie, several people drift into his realm to bring a little tension, a little need. There is his partner, who wants to please his girlfriend. There is his niece, who runs away from home. There is his sister, from whom he has been estranged following some trouble with their father. Early on, he encounters a lost little boy, whom he reunites with his harried mother, whose sanitizing of the child’s hand that Hirayama was holding is her only acknowledgment of Hirayama. Hirayama doesn’t take offense, and waves cheerily back at the child. Some of these exchanges seem to make Hirayama glad of his relatively drama-free life alone; some seem to sadden him.

Perfect Days was filmed in the square Academy ratio, like the Ozu movies (Ozu famously likened the widescreen format to a roll of toilet paper) — or like Living, the nicely judged remake of Kurosawa’s Ikiru. These are movies about repression that are not themselves repressed; in Perfect Days, little shards of life and art keep puncturing Hirayama’s ritualistic manner. His sister tells him that their father, currently failing with dementia, no longer acts the way he once did. It doesn’t convince Hirayama to pay Dad a visit before the movie is over. In a Hollywood version he might. In a very Japanese story directed by a German, there’s no way that’s ever going to happen. 

Koji Yakusho won Best Actor at Cannes for his near-silent work here. He may have won as much for the lingering shot of him near the end as for anything else; his changing expressions contain an entire movie underneath the movie we’re watching. But really he does beautiful little things throughout, and his performance doesn’t seem at all constrained by his lack of dialogue. (It’s a little more than half an hour into the film before he speaks.) He’s not a dour presence (Hirayama smiles up at the morning sky every day he leaves his building for work), just watchful and possibly on the spectrum, given his clinging to routine and his anxious response when something alters the routine. When he retires to bed, his dreams come as fragments of the day’s images, the play of light and shadow. By the end, when he meets a suffering man and reverts them both back to giggling childhood with a game of shadows, it’s in answer to the man’s question, does a shadow added to a shadow make it darker? No, but shadows have a hard time existing without light, however dappled and evanescent the light. The movie respects and embodies komorebi.

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