Simplicities of life captured in German filmmaker’s latest

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This article was published 23/02/2024 (941 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘Analog is back,” announces a youngster in this radiantly lovely Tokyo-set drama from German director Wim Wenders, who co-scripts with Takuma Takasaki.

For Hirayama, our middle-aged central character, analog never left.

A cleaner of public toilets, Hirayama (famed Japanese actor Kôji Yakusho, known for Tampopo and Shall We Dance?) spends his days listening to cassette tapes of Lou Reed, Patti Smith and Otis Redding. He takes photographs with a film camera. He reads books by William Faulkner and Aya Koda. He watches not a screen but the world around him, with a benevolent, slightly bemused gaze.

Perfect Days (in Japanese, with English subtitles) asks its audience to experience this lo-fi, slow-paced world along with Hirayama, to share in his patience, concentration and care.

So, we follow him through his daily routines. Hirayama wakes before dawn to the sound of the street sweeper, brushes his teeth, gets into his uniform, buys coffee from a vending machine and then drives into central Tokyo to start his round of cleaning.

There is an unusual amount of attention given to Hirayama’s labour.

“Why do you put so much into a job like this?” his motormouthed younger colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto) asks, especially when “it just gets dirty again.” But it seems to be the process itself that has meaning for Hirayama — and for Wenders, who shows a lot of mopping up and wiping down.

Then there are Hirayama’s post-work rituals — a visit to the public bathhouse, dinner at his regular food kiosk and some reading.

As he lies down on his sleeping mat, we see glimpses of memories and dreams rendered in imagistic patterns of light and shadow, a self-conscious art-house touch that feels slightly out of place.

In this empathetic but unsentimental meditation on ordinary life, Wenders is clearly drawing on Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Just as we start leaning into the repetition of Hirayama’s everyday life — even his days off have a set rhythm — his rituals are altered, just slightly. It’s in these moments, which Wenders handles with quiet lucidity, that we get some oblique sense of how Hirayama has come to this modest, contained life, through choice and circumstance.

These subtle indications — it would be overstating it to call them revelations — are also grounded in the mostly silent performance of Yakusho, whose lived-in face embodies his character’s accumulation of time, age and experience.

“A great worker, not a great talker,” says Takashi of his older colleague The first time we hear Hirayama speak is when he is comforting a lost child in a park. To the adults around him, at least initially, he has less to say.

But while Hirayama is solitary, he’s not entirely alone. There’s always his city.

Wenders has always had a distinct and poetic sense of place, whether that’s Berlin or Paris, Texas. Here we see repeated shots of the SkyTree, the spectacular structure that dominates the Tokyo skyline, but mostly we see the city’s parks and its actual trees, its narrow byways and crowded intersections and underground malls, and, especially, its public toilets.

(Heads up, Winnipeg: Perfect Days just happens to be a cinematic manifesto for what well-designed, well-maintained public washrooms can contribute to a city and to human dignity in general.)

Wenders conveys what it means to be a small part of the life of a big city. We see the value in the familiar landmarks that greet Hirayama as he drives to work or bikes through his neighbourhood. We see the small comforts he gets from encounters with people whose names he might not even know but who are part of his daily or weekly rounds.

There’s the young man at the public bathhouse who greets him every time he comes. The guy at the food kiosk who brings him a glass of water, saying, “For your hard work.” The second-hand bookstore clerk who always has an opinion on his purchase. (“Patricia Highsmith knows everything about anxiety.”) The regulars at the bar where he goes on his day off.

And there’s Hirayama’s music. Often his song choices reflect what is happening in his day, a notion that takes on profound significance in an astonishing final scene that features a sustained close-up on Hirayama as he drives and listens to the great Nina Simone.

Maybe we aren’t told a lot about Hirayama in this deliberately understated film, but in this moment — so good it makes you hold your breath — we know what we need to know.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com