Perfect Days is a film directed by Wim Wenders based on a script co-written with the Japanese author, Takuma Takasaki. The picture is a "late work", that is, autumnal, serene and unhurried. Typical features of these sorts of "late works" are a simplified, somewhat monumental approach to plot and character; figures are archetypal and representative and, often, appear against broadly symbolic landscapes or settings. Ideas motivating the art work are clearly and openly, even baldly, expressed. Although the plot is often radically simplified, supporting aspects of the narrative may be intricately detailed. Works of this kind express paradoxically an urgency as to communicating basic themes and concepts while, at the same time, achieving a sort of abstract detachment -- the artist is working posthumously while he or she is alive. Everything is of the utmost importance and, yet, also wholly insignificant in light of the larger rhythms of existence which will persist after the creator's death. In Perfect Days, Wenders carefully chronicles about 12 days in the life of Tokyo man, Hirayama, who is employed as a janitor cleaning public toilets in the city. Hirayama is played by Koji Yakusha; this actor is extremely charismatic and handsome -- he looks like a droll Japanese version of Clark Gable. Yakusha's performance, which is almost completely silent, is majestic and the film is unimaginable without his presence in the movie. Wenders uses the situation -- there's really almost no "story" or plot in any conventional sense -- to reprise themes that have been central to his work for fifty years. The movie unobtrusively summarizes Wenders' concerns in many of his other films. Although I hope Wenders is able to continue to make movies for many more years, Perfect Days feels like an envoi or farewell to the movies, both his own works and other pictures that have formed his sensibility.
Perfect Days is rigorously repetitive. Each of Hirayama's days are, more or less, identical with every other day -- the picture follows the toilet cleaner's routines which, with a couple exceptions, proceed like clockwork. Before dawn, generally signified by an impressive high shot of Tokyo under looming clouds open at the horizon to the radiance of the sun just below the horizon, Hirayama rises. He lives in a two room apartment and sleeps on a futon on the floor that he carefully folds and puts away each morning as he rises. (To call Hirayama's apartment "spartan" is an understatement -- it's an empty room with no furniture, just some books and music casettes; he has no furniture, no computer: when he reads, he has to lie on his futon with a little lamp next to his bed; the apartment has no kitchen. When he has a guest, Hirayama has to sleep in a storage closet at the foot of the steps leading up to his place.) The sound of a man with a broom sweeping the street serves as Hirayama's alarm clock. When he hears the sound, he rises, brushes his teeth, and, then, buys a can of coffee from a vending machine rather incongruously located in the alley behind the tenement where he resides. Hirayama wears a one-piece work outfit labeled "The Tokyo Toilet" and he drives a panel-truck to work. Tokyo has 17 spectacular public toilets, apparently new amenities that Wenders was originally planning to feature in a short film. These toilets each have completely different appearances and they are radically modern, lithe, perfectly engineered cubicles amidst concrete terraces in various parks and plazas. Hirayama has a route on which he cleans about six or seven toilets a day. He is an efficient, meticulous worker and the film delights in showing him performing his duties -- the imagery has some of brusque radiance of Bresson's pictures depicting characters at work. Hirayama uses a mirror to check the cleanliness of surfaces that are hard to see and he wipes everything down with disinfectant, polishing the high-tech surfaces of the toilet interiors until they gleam. (Patrons encounter Hirayama in the toilets; some of acknowledge him; to others, he is simply invisible -- when they are using the facilities, he stands stoically outside waiting.) At midday, Hirayama goes to a park with majestic trees. There he uses an old analog camera to take pictures of the light streaming through the forest canopy after eatng a sandwich. After work, he goes to a bar and cafe where he is ritually served a drink and some noodles. After supper, he rides his bicycle around town. Then, he returns to his apartment where he reads a paperback for awhile before shutting his light off to sleep. Then, he repeats the same routine the next day. On his day off, he processes his pictures of light and shadow and, then, sorts them. The photographs that he retains, he keeps in steel boxes neatly labeled in a closet. Also on his day off, he does laundry and may go to a bar where he knows the hostess -- at one point, she sings a fantastic version of "House of the Rising Sun", a tune that he plays on his cassettes in the panel truck sometimes when he goes to work. Wenders punctuates the film with a soundtrack of tunes from the seventies mostly and Hirayama's music mirrors the director's taste -- we hear Lou Reed whose "Perfect Day" is the film's central theme, Nina Simone, Ray Davies, Patti Smith among others. (It's not clear how or why Hirayama has developed this interest in pop tunes composed in English -- there is only one Japanese song played by Hirayama on the soundtrack.) Every other day, Hirayama goes to a public bath. He has no romantic interest in anyone; there isn't even a hint of the erotic in this film. Wenders shows us a man who is radically insular, taciturn and undemonstrative -- but Hirayama isn't unhappy or, even, alienated. We perceive him to well-liked, considered as an "intellectual" in the bookstore that he frequents, and completely satisfied with his existence. The film implies that Hirayama is well-educated, possibly once a world- traveler and that he comes from an elite family -- Hirayama's sister, whom we meet toward the end of the movie, is obviously completely horrified that her brother cleans toilets for a living. In certain ways, the movie resembles a stripped-down version of Five Easy Pieces -- the riddle that the picture poses is why this obviously accomplished man, clearly highly intelligent and motivated, has decided upon this particular vocation.
There are many movies, mostly action pictures, that establish their hero as a creature of routine, a man in interior exile as it were, who is suddenly knocked out of his daily habits by some sort of adventure, either romance or an encounter with violent criminals or something on that order. Wenders nods to this sort of plotting, but, in fact, nothing really happens in the movie -- Hirayama lives in a world in which there are no adventures and nothing really disturbs his routine in the course of the twelve days documented by the movie. Takashi, his sidekick, quits unexpectedly and on one day, Hirayama has to do the full route of 17 or so toilets alone -- this means he works from day into the late night. As one might expect, he is angry about this disruption of his carefully patterned life, but, the next day, he has a new assistant, a young woman and everything returns to his quotidian routine. Toward the end of the movie, Niko, Hirayama's niece, shows up -- the girl has run away from home. She accompanies Hirayama on his daily duties for a couple days before she is picked up by her mother, Hirayama's wealthy sister. Takashi is trying without luck to seduce a young woman. At one point, Hirayama gives him money so he can take the girl on a date. At the end of the movie, Hirayama sees a man embracing the hostess at the bar that the protagonist frequents on the weekend. He and the man who is dying of cancer have a couple drinks together under a bridge and they try to solve the question of whether two shadows that intersect form a darker shadow -- they don't. Then, they play a game of shadow tag. The next morning, Hirayama drives to work again playing a song by Nina Simone called "Feeling Good." The camera lingers on Hirayama's face as he drives the panel truck and, in a remarkable sequence, we see him suffused with joy while also appearing to be close to tears -- what is he thinking? Is he just responding to the song? But, if so, why these reactions? Wenders is best when most tactful. Here he presents us with the visual evidence and leaves us to interpret what the play of emotions on Hirayama's face means.
The picture alludes in many ways to Wenders' own previous films and other movies that have formed his cinematic imagination. The curious game of shadow tag at the end harkens all the way back to Wenders' first feature, The Goalkeepers Anxiety at the Penalty Shot, a picture co-written with the famous German avant-garde writer Peter Handke -- in that movie, Wenders focused on the soccer players who were not handling the football, creating a strange, lyrical vision of the game as pure ballet. This is how the shadow tag looks. An important line in the film is the tautological expression "Next time is next time", just as "now is now." These statements remind me of Handke's theater work in which his actors simply recited tautologies: "The dogs will die like dogs" and "the fish will swim in the sea the like fish swim in the sea." The old radical strategies of Brechtian alienation effects are here naturalized to the point that what was once disturbing and disorienting now seems gentle, diverting, a distant memory from a distant past. The blue collar hero in his panel truck reminds us of the movie projector repairmen in Im Lauf der Zeit (Kings of Road as released in English theaters). The soundtrack of seventies tunes is similar to the music in Alice in the Cities and reminds ne of the great scene in Im Lauf der Zeit in which the two melancholy heroes look out into East Germany while someone says "The Yanks have colonized our subconscious" -- referring to American popular music. The hero reads Faulkner's Wild Palms and short stories by Patricia Highsmith -- also a reference to Wenders' most famous movie, a picture based on Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game, The American Friend. There are reference to Wenders' masters: in one scene, Wenders shows us the elevated roads and highway tunnels in Tokyo with moving shots identical to those deployed by Tarkovsky to suggest the space-shot in his film, Solaris. Many images channel Ozu compositions -- Wenders made a distinguished movie about Ozu, Tokyo-Ga. In a late scene in which the hero sees a man embracing a woman and, then, in a reticent, noncomittal way, looks in another direction, Wenders holds a mirror to the sequence in The Searchers by John Ford in which the hero played by John Wayne sees a woman in a clandestine embrace with a man and looks away -- it's none of his business, although, perhaps, he is also in love with the woman. Wenders orchestrates encounters with incidental characters to impressive effect -- we see a homeless man defiantly practicing Tai Chi, a hapless-looking girl eating her lunch on a park bench near Hirayama and other figures that slip in and out of focus as the film proceeds. Every dawn, when Hirayama comes out of his apartment, he looks up into the sky -- this is important motif in the film: Hirayama, whose work compels him to look down the dirt left by human beings, nonetheless, is repeatedly portrayed observing the sky over him. He is interested in trees, buys a book of essays about trees by Aya Koda, and cultivates seedlings in his apartment. In the park, he takes picture of sunlight penetrating the foliage of majestic trees in that place and, at one point, someone calls the huge TV tower under which Hirayama lives, a symbol for Tokyo (it was central to the imagery in Tokyo-Ga), as the "big tree." When he dreams each night, Hirayama seems to have visions in black and white of light falling through moving foliage, sometimes superimposed on blurry images of people's face or landscapes. Wenders, at the end of his career, has come to regard films as shadows, or shadow-painting. The pictures of light and shadow that grace the film are reminders that those who make movies are painting with shadows. The shadow-play is an image for film-making. Watch the credits to the end: the last frame tells us about a Japanese word Komorebi, a term that means something like the play of light on moving leaves and the shadows that are cast by this light.
I admire this film. It's hard for me to determine how much my lifelong affection for Wenders' movies affects my consideration of this picture. I don't think this film is mawkish or sentimental; in fact, it seems rather tough-minded to me. The world presents us with many mysteries. And not all of these mysteries exist to be solved. You should watch this movie and make your own conclusions.
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