The premise isn’t promising. Tracking the daily routine of a man who cleans public toilets for a living is nobody’s idea of a good time.
Yet Perfect Days consistently finds magic in content that would normally seem bleak or boring, serving as a guide to surviving a world that is increasingly both.
Even if its protagonist, Hirayama, is nearing retirement age, he does not seem to mind labour that much younger people would find exhausting.
Only when his coworker quits, forcing him to perform a double shift, do we perceive cracks in his calm demeanour.
Instead of the dialogue normally used to flesh out a character, veteran actor Koji Yakusho uses finely calibrated facial movements to convey how Hirayama responds to his physical environment and the people who cross his path.
Rather than rush to express himself, he looks and listens. And we look and listen with him, our identification with the character strengthened by his reluctance to communicate verbally.
In a message that played before Perfect Days‘ screenings during its US theatrical run, Wenders explains how the Japanese word komorebi was his guiding concept in making the film.
The term refers to the play of shadows caused by light streaming through trees, which never recurs the exact same way. But it’s not hard to see that komorebi is also deployed metaphorically.
Over the course of the film, we learn how to read Hirayama’s face, registering small changes in his mood. Sometimes, it almost feels like we are watching a silent film by Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton.
Perfect Days’ remarkable final sequence gives us an extended head-on view of him driving to work, shot as if from a camera perched on the hood of his van, as he reacts to Nina Simone’s remarkable rendition of “Feeling Good.”
One second, he appears to be overcome by joy, the next by grief. It feels like we are watching the play of light and shadow across his consciousness. The constant throughout is change.
Because the film is almost entirely devoid of the drama we take for granted in mainstream movies, we must pay close attention to details. That’s why Perfect Days represents a triumphant return to the “slow cinema” that made Wenders’ reputation in the 1970s, to the surprise of even diehard fans.
In recent decades, like his friend Werner Herzog, Wenders has focused most of his energy on making documentaries.
As financing for ambitious fiction projects dried up, these legends of the New German Cinema recognised that they could have greater freedom and less risk if they turned their talents to the burgeoning category of creative non-fiction.
The results have been impressive, including bona fide hits like Herzog’s Grizzly Man and Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club. Yet even when documentaries prioritise storytelling over slavish devotion to what happened, they are still constrained by the facticity of their subject.
That’s why I was excited to learn that Wenders would be releasing two films last year: a documentary on painter Anselm Kiefer, which had been in the works for years, and the made-up story Perfect Days.
But I was also apprehensive. It had been over three decades since the director last made a great work of fiction, the five-hour director’s cut of Until the End of the World, and almost four since Paris, Texas, the last one that retained the modest scope of his early films.
Although I love the way Wenders thinks about cinema, I sensed that the impulse to go big had become an impediment to his craft, as had been the case with so many great directors before him, from Eric von Stroheim to Orson Welles to Francis Ford Coppola.
Only the limits set by the documentary format seemed capable of keeping Wenders’ films clear and concise.
When I learned that Perfect Days would be entirely in Japanese, I grew more optimistic about the finished product, reasoning that Wenders’ ignorance of the language spoken by his actors would help him concentrate on the foundations of cinema.
After seeing a preview of the film, however, my confidence wavered. It made Perfect Days seem like the story of an older man’s rejuvenation, implying that romance with a much younger woman might be in the cards.
Since Wenders’ fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s frequently foregrounded men’s existential feelings at the expense of the women they interacted with, I braced myself for some cringe-worthy scenes.
Still, I remained eager to see Perfect Days and was pleased to learn that it would be shown at The Loft Cinema’s annual film festival in Tucson last October, months before its stateside theatrical release.
To my great relief, once the film started playing, I realised that the preview had been deceptive. It had clearly been created to lure in more mainstream viewers, the sort who might be willing to give art-house fare a chance, provided it didn’t stray too far from Hollywood convention.
Instead, the first twenty minutes of Perfect Days turned out to be a studio boss’s nightmare.
Not only do we follow the mundane routine of its protagonist, Hirayama, as he wakes up, gets ready for work, and then starts cleaning toilets. We must adjust to the fact that this portion of the film has almost no speech.
Perfect Days feels like a bare-bones documentary.
And indeed, that’s how the project got off the ground. The firm that runs the public toilets in Tokyo’s Shibuya neighbourhood—admittedly far nicer than their counterparts in most other cities—contacted Wenders with the idea of him making just such a film.
Rather improbably, the director decided that he should return to fiction with this tale of a sanitation worker who leads a life of quiet satisfactions.
For people who came to know Wenders through his international successes Paris, Texas, Wings of Desire, and Until the End of the World, all high-concept tales, the modesty of Perfect Days probably came as a surprise.
By contrast, those familiar with earlier films such as The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, Alice in the Cities, or Kings of the Road should understand the impulse to go small, even if they were baffled that a German director was returning to his roots with a story taking place in Japan.
But why did Wenders and his co-screenwriter Takuma Takasaki decide to fabricate a character instead of documenting the life of an actual sanitation worker?
After all, Hirayama does almost nothing out of the ordinary. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to find a real-world equivalent.
Now that I’ve seen Perfect Days several times, I understand why Wenders felt it needed to be a work of fiction.
Although the story never strays from plausibility, it has an allegorical quality that would feel awkward in the context of a documentary.
The farther we get into the film, the more apparent it becomes that Hirayama’s dedication to routines is bound up with a self-conscious retreat from the world of fame and fortune.
He has emigrated without ever leaving his homeland, like hermits who give up the trappings of civilisation for a minimalist existence on the margins of society.
Early in the film, while cleaning a toilet in a small park, he hears a little boy crying inside one of the stalls and goes to comfort him. Soon, the boy is reunited with his mother.
As Hirayama watches her berate the boy for getting lost, a cloud passes over his face. When the boy turns around to express his gratitude, he smiles.
At this point in the story, we know Hirayama doesn’t talk much, but we don’t know why. Only later does it become apparent that his near silence is a conscious choice.
We see him reading literature before going to sleep at night and listening to classic rock and roll on audio cassettes, typically while driving his van to work.
He photographs trees in the park where he eats his lunch, turning his point-and-shoot camera upward to catch the light streaming through their leaves, documenting the phenomenon komorebi describes.
Then, he carefully sorts through the black-and-white prints, only keeping the shots that please him, and places them in an aluminium box, which he stores alongside many other aluminium boxes, each labelled with a date.
Hirayama also cultivates bonsai, devoting a sizable percentage of his cramped living quarters to their care. When he sees a maple seedling growing at the base of one of the trees in the park, he asks the priest who tends the shrine there for permission to take it. Then, he pulls a makeshift paper pot out of his pocket and digs it up to bring home.
In short, Hirayama leads a decidedly aesthetic existence, however humble, and gives the impression of being someone who was brought up to do big things but prefers small ones.
When the great novelist Junichiro Tanizaki wrote In Praise of Shadows in the 1930s, he was trying to preserve the values of traditional Japanese culture against the onslaught of a modernisation that was inextricably bound up with the West.
Tanizaki repeatedly acknowledges the drawbacks of the old ways, which are less efficient, less capacious, and less bright than their newfangled replacements, but he praises them regardless.
At one point, he even delivers a stirring paean to the outhouse.
“The parlour may have its charms,” Tanizaki notes, “but a Japanese toilet is truly a place of spiritual repose.” The need for it to be far away from the living area makes it a refuge. “No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden.”
Despite their varied architecture and remarkable cleanliness, the toilets in Perfect Days testify to the complete triumph of the West over the East in matters of hygiene.
Yet Hirayama still manages to sustain a lifestyle consonant with Tanizaki’s argument, celebrating shadows in both a literal and figurative sense.
That explains why the dream sequences in the film, rendered in muted black and white by Wenders’ wife Donata, all document the play of light and shadow and why his single-minded photography does the same.
Perfect Days also makes less obvious use of komorebi.
Hirayama’s devotion to used books and well-worn cassettes goes hand in hand with his aversion to contemporary technology. Although they may be less convenient than a mobile phone and prone to deterioration, those qualities convey a singularity that digital content cannot achieve.
Even though Wenders was an early and enthusiastic adopter of new imaging techniques, he feels an affinity for his protagonist’s stubborn refusal to change with the times.
Perfect Days comes off as a subdued manifesto.
Hirayama’s retreat from a world besotted with technological improvements is an allegory for “slow cinema” itself.
Faced with the diminishing returns of a computer-dominated approach that prioritises special effects over character development, perhaps it is time for directors who care about storytelling to turn their back to the future.
Wenders makes no secret of his devotion to the pared-down approach of Yasujiro Ozu, who came as close as anyone to repurposing the quintessentially modern medium of cinema for the traditional aesthetics celebrated by Tanizaki.
As we watch Hirayama navigate his comparatively modest residential neighbourhood east of the Sumida River, far from central Tokyo’s brightly lit high rises, a massive television tower—the biggest of its kind in the world—looms incongruously on the horizon.
While it might seem logical for him to resent the tower’s presence, particularly since it is a comparatively new feature of the landscape, the opposite appears to be the case. He keeps craning his neck upward to see it, the hint of a smile passing over his face.
Presumably, that has something to do with what the tower is called: Skytree.
Because the name is rendered in the phonetic characters reserved for foreign loan words, it is pronounced the way a Japanese speaker would say “sky” and “tree”.
It’s hard to imagine a structure more antithetical to the horizontally oriented wood buildings Tanizaki exalts in his essay.
Yet Hirayama can look past the tower’s superficial characteristics to perceive an underlying connection with the trees he loves.
Although the Skytree is a tourist destination, with breathtaking views from its top, he is content to regard it from ground level.
In his 1985 documentary Tokyo-Ga, Wenders pays homage to Ozu’s legacy in a variety of ways.
Ozu famously avoided shooting from the vantage point typical for Western films, instead setting up his camera to capture scenes from a point near the ground, just above the traditional tatami mats of Japanese homes.
This preference for a worm’s eye view responds to Tanizaki’s argument from In Praise of Shadows, suggesting that filmmaking could adapt to traditional Japanese ways.
As much as he reveres Ozu, Wenders permits himself a much wider variety of perspectives.
Perfect Days opens and closes with shots taken high above Tokyo from a vantage point aligned with the top of the Skytree. We also see many overhead views of Hirayama navigating traffic in his van.
These shots situate him within a wider world he mostly ignores. Although he could travel to the top of the Skytree, he doesn’t feel the need.
For his part, Wenders seems torn between the virtues of Hirayama’s sedulous myopia and the bigger picture he has been trying to bring into focus throughout his career.
One scene in Tokyo Ga takes us to the top of the Tokyo Tower, a post-World War II predecessor to the Skytree, with panoramic views of the vast metropolitan area below.
We see Wenders engaged in conversation with Werner Herzog.
Pondering the “decaying landscape” far below, Herzog laments that modern civilisation no longer has images that can resist its complexity. As tall as the Tokyo Tower is, it doesn’t provide sufficient distance from everyday existence.
“I’d have to climb 8000 meters up a mountain if I wanted to find images that are pure, clean, and transparent,” Herzog declares before expressing a desire to participate in a mission to Mars.
As the documentary cuts away from Herzog to a street-level shot, Wenders’ voice-over narration resumes.
“No matter how much I understood Werner’s quest for transparent and pure images,” he explains, “the images I was searching for were only to be found down here, below, in the chaos of the city.
The more time we spend with Hirayama’s character, the clearer it becomes that his adherence to routine is a way to ward off all but the most immediate concerns.
Midway through the film, his teenage niece Niko runs away from home after a fashion to stay with him. Although Hirayama indulges the girl for a time, permitting her to follow along when he makes his rounds, he eventually tells his sister Keiko to pick her up.
Keiko arrives in an expensive chauffeured car and awkwardly conveys gratitude for Hirayama’s assistance by offering him a store-bought gift.
Even though the siblings seem genuinely happy to see each other, it’s difficult for them to connect. Keiko finds it hard to believe that he is willing to live so modestly, asking him incredulously if he cleans toilets for a living.
Although Keiko implores her brother to visit their ailing father, indicating that the old man is too ill to behave as he once did, Hirayama refuses.
The early scene with the lost little boy now takes on new meaning. Even in his sixties, Hirayama still bears the scars of parental abuse.
Like other privileged “drop-outs” of the Baby Boom generation, he seems to have fled the rabidly competitive existence forced upon men of his class for a slower, saner life.
By reminding us of this possibility, Perfect Days delivers a valuable message to viewers of any age who are rendered miserable by performance anxiety. There are certainly worse fates than escaping the rat race for a world where success isn’t measured by wealth or fame.
Hirayama’s assiduously pared-down existence could also inspire people who feel overwhelmed by the barrage of audiovisual stimuli that afflict not only the inhabitants of mega-cities like Tokyo but anyone who spends too much time on devices connected to the Internet.
However, as much sympathy as Wenders has for his protagonist, he recognises that Hirayama’s approach to life has limits.
Even the most perfect routines will be interrupted by unforeseen circumstances. No matter how much we prioritise the little things, there will be times when big ones crowd them out.
Try as he might, Hirayama can’t simply capture the effect of komorebi and store the evidence away in his closet. Sometimes, the shadows will fall on him.
In the penultimate scene of Perfect Days, he goes down to the banks of the Sumida River to drink after accidentally witnessing an interaction between the innkeeper he fancies and another man.
But that man soon joins him. In the course of their ensuing conversation, we learn that the man is the innkeeper’s ex-husband and has a terminal illness. The antipathy Hirayama initially felt turns to compassion.
He invites the man to play shadow tag. Then, they conduct an experiment to see whether their shadows grow darker when they overlap.
When they realise that nothing changes, we perceive a subtle lesson about suffering. It doesn’t get any worse when we share it, and we will probably feel better after doing so.
Reflecting on the rest of Perfect Days, we remember that Hirayama’s face always seems to light up when he lets his guard down sufficiently to interact with someone else.
While his devotion to routine clearly protects him from pain, only the unexpected breaks from it imbue his actions with meaning.
This realisation directs us towards the film’s allegorical implications.
Everyday life is like the documentary Wim Wenders was originally asked to make, metonymically figured by the photographs Hirayama takes, prints, sorts, and files away. Although this labour is necessary, it ultimately isn’t enough.
Yes, we must attend to the small things in life, perceiving the world from a grounded perspective.
But we also need to leave room for surprises, those flights of fancy that temporarily transport us to a vantage point where we contemplate our routines from afar.
That’s where fiction comes in.
During the years when Wenders was only making documentaries, he was a lot like Hirayama at the beginning of the film.
This project gave the German director the impetus to see the big picture again, recognising that a sustainable future for cinema will require telling stories like Perfect Days.
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Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
