Perfect Days
Wim Wenders returns to Japan to make his best fictional work in years.
These are great times for Wim Wenders. 2023 saw him at the top of his game as a documentarist with Anselm, that splendid film about Anselm Kiefer in which Kiefer’s art was illuminated by that of Wenders. Over the years he has become famed for his documentaries so it was no surprise to me when Anselm took a place in my Top Ten favourites for 2023. Nevertheless, it was with dramas that he made his name and even today such films as Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987) are probably his best remembered works. Despite that his more recent dramatised features have for the most part disappointed and there is even irony in the fact that one such made in 2015 was entitled Every Thing Will Be Fine. In that context it is all the more pleasing to find that his latest piece with actors is being acknowledged as his best film of that kind in years. Confirmation of that lies in the fact that Perfect Days has now become a 2024 Oscar nominee in the category of Best International Feature Film.
Many admirers of Wim Wenders may well be surprised to discover that for the Oscars Perfect Days represents Japan and it is, indeed, a work set in Tokyo with an exclusively Japanese cast. But others will recall that back in the 1980s Wenders made two documentaries with strong Japanese connections: Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989) featured the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto but even more significant here is the 1985 work Tokyo-ga designed as a tribute to the great Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu. The admiration that Wenders has long had for Ozu and his deep understanding of Ozu’s films has fed directly into Perfect Days which finds Wenders totally at ease and able to capture Japanese life in a manner that echoes the everyday naturalism of Ozu’s work together with its unsentimental but deeply humane sympathies.
Back in 1924 another German director, F.W. Murnau, made a classic silent film about the life of a man working in a toilet: that was The Last Laugh and it centred on the humiliation felt by a hotel doorman demoted in his later years to working as an attendant in the washroom. Perfect Days is also about a man well into middle age whose job is not dissimilar. This is Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho) whose work involves travelling around Tokyo cleaning the city’s toilets but this man's outlook could not be more different for he actually takes pride in his job. If that sounds rather odd, it is worth noting here that Tokyo has become famous for its outstandingly fine toilets as redesigned following Covid. Indeed, Wenders was invited to consider the Tokyo Toilet Project as it was known as the possible subject of a documentary but then decided that it would work better as the background for a tale about a cleaner. That was how Wenders came to collaborate with Takuma Takasaki in the writing of Perfect Days.
If Wenders is the ideal director here due to his rapport with the work of Ozu, it is also the case that Perfect Days gains enormously from the casting of Kôji Yakusho. The actor is known to us for a number of earlier films – not least the engaging Shall We Dance? made in 1995 – but the role of Hirayama is so wonderfully realised that it will surely be the actor's crowning glory. Perfect Days is admirably photographed by Franz Lustig and splendidly edited by Toni Froschhammer but, because it deals so much not just in the everyday but in the repetitious nature of Hirayama’s work, it requires a lead actor who quietly lives the part and is able by that means to hold the viewer. Yakusho achieves that so completely that he is likely to be my actor of the year.
Arguably more of a character study than a story, Perfect Days is a portrait of a man who has become a loner but who nevertheless finds something of value in his life. In addition to being devoted to his work, he keeps his interests alive. They include photography, the world of nature (he takes many pictures of trees), reading (favoured authors range from Faulkner to Patricia Highsmith) and pop music of the past. This latter enthusiasm means that, whether at home or in his car as he drives around for his work, he listens to audio cassettes. Wenders makes a point of featuring this music in the film and those heard include Lou Reed’s title song together with recordings by the likes of The Kinks, Patti Smith, Otis Redding and The Rolling Stones. There’s even a Japanese version of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’! In every single case Wenders shows admirable judgment in giving us exactly the right amount of each song and he is equally adapt at varying the camera shots which portray the daily repetitions in Hirayama's life.
What Hirayama makes of his life is central to the film but in bringing that out the film also introduces convincing subsidiary characters such as his slacker assistant Takashi (Tokio Emoto), the latter’s girl friend (Yamada Aoi) and Mama (Sayuri Ishikawa) who runs a restaurant that Hirayama visits regularly. Two elements provide extra developments in the later stages of the film. Although Hirayama family’s have little contact with him, his niece Niko (Arisa Nakano), who is at odds with her mother, comes visiting and bonds with him until she is summoned back home. Also, perhaps fitting slightly less well with the rest, Hirayama encounters a stranger (Tomokazu Miura) who is known to Mama and they later share confidences. Regardless of these developments, Perfect Days is patently something of a minimalistic work and audiences who find themselves put off by that style may not take to it. Letting the film run to 125 minutes is perhaps a shade risky and rather oddly the film does incorporate some night-time dream shots photographed in black-and-white and designed in collaboration with Donata Wenders, the wife of the director. But if you are on this film’s wavelength any doubts are minor indeed: Perfect Days is close to being a masterpiece. Its tone is essentially positive as it blends elements of nostalgia with the need to accept one’s lot and to embrace the most in whatever life offers you.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Yakusho Kôji, Emoto Tokio, Nakano Arisa, Yamada Aoi, Sayuri Ishikawa, Tomokazu Miura, Yumi Asô, Min Tanaka, Tamae Andô, Inuko Inuyama, Bunmei Harada, Miyako Tanaka, Yuriko Kawasaki.
Dir Wim Wenders, Pro Koji Yanai, Wim Wenders and Takuma Takasaki, Screenplay Wim Wenders and Takuma Takasaki, Ph Franz Lustig, Pro Des Towako Kuwajima, Ed Toni Froschhammer, Costumes Daisuke Iga.
Master Mind Productions/Wenders Images-Mubi.
125 mins. Japan/Germany. 2023. US Rel: 7 February 2024. UK Rel: 23 February 2024. Cert. PG.
