Review of the film “Perfect Days” by Wim Wenders

“Perfect Days” by Wim Wenders was awarded at Cannes and nominated for an Oscar. The director considers this film, which is being released this week in Russian distribution, not only one of the most successful, but also one of the most personal in the director’s work. Andrey Plakhov.

Wenders always loved cities, claiming that asphalt jungles and urban wastelands were as filled with poetry as prairies and deserts. The German cosmopolitan settled in the Parisian Cinematheque, then traveled around America and found his Paris in Texas. And then he returned to Berlin, whose character at that time was determined by the Wall. It was she who sharpened the feeling of the city to the limit. There is a brilliant discovery in The Sky Over Berlin – angels freely floating above the Wall. God sent them and told them to prepare a report on what was happening in this city. Wenders presented the urban fairy tale as a documentary report, as if filmed by one of the angels who was equipped with a movie camera. Even in close-ups there is a slightly upward view: as the director puts it, “such is the angelic perspective.”

After that, Wenders made films in Lisbon, New York, Palermo and other cities, but even before “Sky over Berlin” he opened the Japanese capital. In the film “Tokyo-Ga” he showed what has changed and what remains of the Tokyo in which director Yasujiro Ozu, the singer of triumphant everyday life, lived and worked for six decades. Wenders had already overcome the wandering gaze of a tourist and trusted the city. Almost forty years later, he filmed Perfect Days in Tokyo. In this film you again feel how the heart of the German classic beats and hurts. Although the director chose to talk about himself, choosing a character who was as unlike himself as possible, the result was a self-portrait.

I remember an old story from personal practice. Together with my British colleague Derek Malcolm, who was the president of the International Federation of Film Critics FIPRESCI (and I was its vice-president), we gave an interview to one TV channel. Derek, not only an excellent professional, but also a man with an infallible sense of humor, squinted as he listened to a young journalist who said: “I realized that you film critics spend their lives traveling to film festivals, it’s so difficult – traveling all the time, be separated from your family? Derek replied: “Yes, our profession is difficult. But it’s still easier than cleaning toilets.”

The hero of “Perfect Days” is Hirayama, a cleaner of Tokyo public toilets (played by the first-class artist Koji Yakusho), every morning he puts on overalls and makes a ritual tour of his “objects”, scrubbing the urinals to a shine and showing not only perfectionism, but also genuine love to work. Neither his young rogue employee nor his sister, who lives in the world of expensive cars, can understand this. Why does her intellectual brother, who spends his evenings reading Faulkner, Beckett and Ayu Koda, spend his days cleaning toilets? Why does he live alone in a squalid apartment without a shower and washes himself in a public bathhouse? There is no explanation for this in the film, but it is clear that it was not material difficulties, but the overcoming of some directly unnamed guilt that forced the hero to take on this monastic asceticism. There is no challenge or claim to exclusivity in this, just as there is no claim to exclusivity in Wenders’ film itself, which easily fits into a number of works by authors close to him – Jarmusch, Imamura, Kaurismaki, while maintaining its own special identity.

In Japanese culture, cleaning the toilet is considered a noble activity. Diligently maintaining external cleanliness of places intended for the fulfillment of supposedly shameful needs maintains internal hygiene, healthy asceticism and improves karma. Not to mention the public benefit. It can be said that Hirayama is the angel of Tokyo, and he also has his own angelic perspective. He uses his breaks in work to film “komorebi” – the flickering play of light and shadows in the treetops. And through it the “sky over Tokyo” opens.

Another character in this film has cancer and his “perfect days” are coming to an end. He smokes selflessly and plays shadow theater with Hirayama. Wenders says goodbye. He also says goodbye to the life he spent in close contact with the counterculture of the 1960s–1980s. It comes to life in the recordings of Lou Reed (his hit “Perfect Day” gave the title to the film), Patti Smith, Nina Simone, the Rolling Stones and other idols of a bygone era on Hirayama’s retro cassettes. They seem funny to young people, but at the same time they find new connoisseurs who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for them. Life passes, but continues somehow differently. Wenders, together with his hero, personifies the disappearing world, which is now fashionable to call analog, but there are no analogues to it and there will never be any.