“Perfect Days”: new film by Wim Wenders
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A new film by Wim Wenders is being released in Russia. “Perfect Days” is the perfect movie to show how wonderful a toilet cleaner’s job is, especially when it comes to designer toilets in Tokyo.
All days of Hirayama, a middle-aged toilet cleaner, are the same: he wakes up, brushes his teeth, puts on a blue uniform with the inscription “Tokyo Toilet” on it, and leaves the house. Looks at the sky, at the Sky Tree tower. He takes coffee from the machine, gets into the van and drives to work, listening to classic rock on cassettes along the way. Lou Reed, Stones, Patti Smith, Van Morrison, Nina Simone. His job is that he cleans public toilets – carefully, thoughtfully, even, it seems, with pleasure. Having lunch in the park. He takes photographs of the world with an old film camera, on black and white film, and puts the successful photos in a closet, in boxes on which the year and month when these photos were taken are written. After work, he washes himself in the bathhouse. He has dinner at the same diner. At night he reads books from a used bookstore – Faulkner, Aya Koda, Patricia Highsmith, it doesn’t matter. In black and white dreams he sees sunlight breaking through the leaves.
For the silent, serene Hirayama, no days are the same: today he finds a piece of paper with tic-tac-toe in the toilet, tomorrow his shift worker brings his girlfriend to work, the day after tomorrow he sees a homeless man in the park and smiles at him, and two days later his niece suddenly appears at his house, whom he had not seen for what seemed like many years. All these are promises of some plots, but they disappear untold, unfulfilled. Doesn’t matter.
Wim Wenders, a middle-aged singer of loneliness, made a melancholic, quiet and precise film about the relationship between light and shadow. Cinematography is also an exploration of how shadows dance on the wall. There is no strain in this film – although Hirayama obviously once had a completely different life – no self-deprecation, no moralizing. What “Ideal Days” is about is something everyone chooses for themselves. Some will see the film as the embodiment of Zen, others as an ode to the fading analogue world, others as a portrait of daily quiet service. The hero of Wenders’ “Alice in the Cities” answered the question “What is it like to live alone?” answered: “Fine, better every day.”
Hirayama is getting better with every perfect day. He is not condemned to his routine, like Jeanne Dielman in Chantal Akerman’s masterpiece, he does not write anything, unlike Jarmusch’s Paterson, he does not try to come to terms with the past or force himself to live a new life, like the heroes of the tragic “Renaissance” by Masahiro Kobayashi. All these films, like “Perfect Days,” are built on monotony, monotony of actions – but in them the main events begin when this monotony stumbles. In “Ideal Days,” monotony itself turns out to be the plot, and all unexpected meetings and incidents only hinder the hero.
Wenders originally came to Tokyo to film several short films about 17 designer toilets. Among the authors of the toilets are the world famous Shigeru Ban (he made two structures from “smart glass”, the transparent walls of which become cloudy when the visitor locks the door from the inside), Tadao Ando, Marc Newson. Having seen these architectural wonders, Wenders decided to make a feature film.
Hirayama, then, is not just a blue collar worker doing the dirtiest work. He doesn’t scrub toilets, he rather keeps the new image of the city clean, clears every millimeter of futuristic structures from non-existent dirt.
The entire film grew out of the personality of the actor Koji Yakusho, who starred in Shohei Imamura, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike, and won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival for “Perfect Days.” There is almost no bitterness in his smile – and this is a very important “almost”. There is no pretense in his calmness. But in addition, Wenders admits that while working on the script, he remembered a monk he knew. “He was also a singer, his name was Leonard Cohen… during his apprenticeship he had to do various jobs, including cleaning toilets.”
Wenders doesn’t think he’s made a “Japanese movie,” but says he may have learned to approach things a little more Japanesely, with attention and respect for small details. This is certainly one of his most complete and valuable films. In Hirayama there is the noble stoicism of Ozu’s heroes (Wenders borrowed the name from the hero of “The Taste of Saury” by Ozu), and the curiosity of the Berlin angels from Wenders’ main film about loneliness – “Sky over Berlin”, and a rethinking of the ever-changing Tokyo: the last time Wenders undertook such attempt in the documentary “Tokyo-ga”, which explored a Tokyo in which Ozu no longer exists. In that film, he said: “I wish I could learn to shoot, as if you open your eyes and just look at the world, without trying to prove anything.”
Perfect Days seems to be shot that way—but it’s a deceptively simple, deceptively sweet film. Towards the end of the film, the hero checks whether a shadow becomes blacker if another shadow falls on it. Towards the end of the film, he begins to tire of the perfect days of his quiet life. Sentimentality creeps into his life. New characters appear, new possibilities for the plot – comedic, romantic, dramatic. Hirayama turns away from them.
And it becomes obvious that there is some deep, slow and dark layer in the film that is scary to get into: for example, who is this homeless man that no one except the main character can see? His possible life? Just homeless? What are these photos in boxes that say “2023 9” and “2023 10”, despite the fact that the film premiered in May 2023?
No, it doesn’t matter. It’s easier to think of this as a quiet story about a man who sees the light than about a man who is afraid that the shadows will overlap each other and turn completely black.
In theaters from February 1
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