Joyce Glasser reviews Perfect Days (February 23, 2024) Cert 12A, 124 mins.
Thanks to cinema’s ability to cross borders, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest won a BAFTA for both the Best Foreign Language Film and the Best British Film, and German filmmaker Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (co-written with Takuma Takasaki) is Japan’s official entry to the Academy Awards. It’s easy to understand the selection and why Kōji Yakusho (Babel, 13 Assassins, Shall We Dance) won the Best Actor Award at Cannes, but Perfect Days is not quite a perfect film.
That’s not to say it is not beguiling and appealing on many levels. For one thing, it’s a musical, in which the main character, Hirayama (Yakusho), a single, sexagenarian cleaner, is our DJ whose taste happens to correspond to the tastes of a liberal, Western, arthouse audience of a corresponding age. Each morning, Hirayama’s unchanging routine, which is a tantalising feature of the film, includes him leaving his clean but compact unit in a ramshackle complex, getting a coffee out of a vending machine, and like clock-work, popping a tape – a relic from a bygone era – into the tape deck in his old van.
Another reason why it’s so likeable is that Perfect Days is the first feature film inspired by public toilets, a subject in which we are all interested. Tokyo’s Shibuya Public Toilets Project enables Wenders to combine some nifty inspirational architecture with civic pride – and Tokyo’s acknowledgement that pleasant toilets improve the quality of life. If you live in the UK, where even finding a disgusting toilet open when you need it is a problem, there is an element of well-being and even fantasy or wish fulfilment here.
But the toilets, including architect Ban Shigeru’s see-through green and turquoise glass squares at Haru-no Ogawa Community Park which turn opaque as you lock the door, are only part of the visual and intellectual joys of this insiders’ view of Tokyo.
As a foreigner, and a director with a cinematographer’s and production designer’s eye, Wenders luxuriates in the variety of this unfathomable city, from the dizzying motorways to the noisy cafes in underground malls and the intimate off-the-beaten track restaurants to the public baths where Hirayama is a regular. After work or on days off he cycles over the Sumida river, making stops along the way.
In what never becomes a monotonous gimmick, we follow Hirayama through his working day, day after day, watching him methodically scrubbing the beaming toilets across the Shibuya District; exchanging looks with a withdrawn woman eating her lunch alone in the same park as Hirayama; observing a man hugging a tree; playing tik-tac-toe with an anonymous user of a toilet; and dealing with his unreliable young assistant Takashi (Tokio Emoto) who does not share his superior’s work ethic. For Takashi the job is just a means to winning over his music loving girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada). When Takashi discovers that a music shop will pay top dollar for Hirayama’s vintage tapes, he tries in vain to get him to sell.
Wenders, who is 78, paints a romantic portrait of this sweet-natured, industrious, gentle man who should be retired, not doing manual labour. Hirayama sprays his plants each morning, watches the wind rustle through the trees at lunch, and listens to Lou Reed, Nina Simone, Ottis Redding and Patti Smith while driving. When his niece (Arisa Nakano) who has run away from home, comes to stay, she reads the name “van-mor-ris-son” phonetically from the odd plastic case.
But this is an episodic portrait that grew out of an invitation to make a short film about the toilet project. As Wenders strives to flesh out the story of this intriguing and mysterious man, he gives us hints, but never enough, for a story to materialise.
Hirayama takes pride in work some might find demeaning, and lives on the margins of society, but he’s no diamond in the rough. It’s here that the film turns self-conscious, so that in addition to his taste for 1960s and 1970s Western alternative rock music the camera pauses on the books Hirayama reads: Patricia Highsmith and William Faulkner’s Wild Palms – a tale of survival and self-sacrifice which might provide clues into Hirayama’s past.
Inexplicably, Hirayama appears mute in the beginning and for long segments of the film as though he has suffered a trauma we never learn about. But gradually we learn that his speech is directed selectively and does not include his work colleagues or the regulars at the bath house. The chosen few he speaks to include the book shop owner, the attractive owner of a welcoming little gourmet restaurant, his niece running away from her protective, wealthy mother, and his sister, who shows up with a chauffeur to reclaim her daughter, mentioning a dying father.
In this generally disarming portrayal Hirayama as a guileless man more in love with nature than society, a kind of St Francis character, cracks appear. This is particularly evident in a Call Me By Your Name ending that no doubt clinched the Best Actor award for the marvellous Yakusho. But it’s a moment you either believe, and shed a tear yourself, or one that feels unearned and a tad manipulative.
