You May Have Missed: Perfect Days (Dir Wim Wenders, 2h 4m, 2023)

 

Ma (Japanese, lit. 'gap, space, pause'). The empty spaces, the pauses between things. Ma appears everywhere in Japanese cinema; the stillness before duels in samurai films, complete stillness before sudden, explosive action, the works of Hayao Miyazaki, best seen in the still, contemplative train sequence of Spirited Away (2003), a snapshot of a moment, a pause before further action. This is not to say stillness and pauses are a singularly Japanese cinematic phenomenon, but mu is this stillness turned into deliberate intervals, into a calming break, a sanctuary, before further action; much of Yasujirō Ozu's filmography, in its simple, quintessentially Japanese style, considers ma, and its opposite, mu, nothingness, being filled by figures walking into it.

Perfect Days, the most recent film by German director Wim Wenders, considers just this, the quiet pauses in the life of a Tokyo toilet cleaner, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) becoming meditations upon a solipsistic, and deliberately aesthetically sparse life, a cycle of work and photographs and 70s rock music played on cassettes and foreign novels, that is interrupted by encounters with other people. Wenders, for the uninitiated, is one third of the great German power trio that brought Neuer Deutscher Film (New German Cinema) to English-speaking audiences, alongside the prolific Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who died at only 37 in 1982 of a drug overdose, and the indomitable Werner Herzog, who should need no introduction.

At the centre of Perfect Days is Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) and his aesthetically simple life of books, photographs and music.

Wenders' films are dominated by memory, nostalgia, and an often infectious sense of movement; this is typified by Paris, Texas (1984), a magnificently scaled roadtrip, soundtracked by Ry Cooder's drifting guitar and Robby Müller's cinematography, and the equally colossal (including in length) Until the End of the World, a road-trip movie that covers entire continents, best seen in the nearly five hour cut via Criterion, as well as Wings of Desire (1987), in which an angel becomes mortal to fall in love with a woman. Perfect Days, meanwhile, comes from a curious origin: for the 2020 Olympics, Tokyo erected 17 public toilets in the shopping district of Shibuya many of them either with design choices influenced by Japanese design, a particular purpose, other than as toilet, or designed by internationally acclaimed architects; partly funded by Koji Yanai, the son of a Japanese billionaire, Koji invited Wenders to make several shorts. Out of this slightly peculiar origin story comes Perfect Days.

We begin with Tokyo; the film itself was shot over a remarkably short 17 days, and we begin the first of these days with Hirayama's routine; it is here that music, one of the demarcations of his daily routine enters the picture, as, taking his small van to work, so enters "The House of the Rising Sun" by The Animals. Music plays a major role in Hirayama's life-it is, for much of the film a window into his life, the one variable, other than his reading material, to his days. Its format, his stacks of tapes, and his care in manually rewinding them, are as much a suggestion of a man living in deliberate simplicity, in a aesthete's existence, as a man out of time with the world around him. The film being entirely scoreless, every time music enters the film, via Hirayama's tapes, it feels important, from the warmth of Otis Redding's "Sitting On the Dock of the Bay" to bonding with a young woman over Patti Smith's "Redondo Beach" to, of course, Lou Reed's titular song; it is the film's climatic sequence, involving Nina Simone's "Feeling Good" that truly lingers with the audience after the credits roll

Behind Hiryama's day-to-day traversal of life is a far more complex figure, and an acting masterclass by Yakusho

This music is the "weather" of Hirayama's life, the changing features on the daily routine. We follow his day, this pattern we see broken and returned to, the cycle of days; there's more than a hint of Groundhog Day (1992) to the first loop of the day, in which everything, from the locked-off long-shot of Tokyo, to the old woman sweeping, to the entire sequences of Hirayama's day; yet it is his reaction to the loop of the day that surprises. This minutiae of cleaning, the attention to detail, of the details of the seventeen toilets, from glass-fronted to wooden to ceramic designs, and the care taken, may seem like mind-numbing work; Hirayama's young colleague Takashi (an enjoyably gormless Tokio Emoto) is less diligent, often late, and invariably distracted by his would-be girlfriend, Aya (Aoi Yamada) ; his working relationship with Hirayama is occasionally fractious, having to borrow his boss's van when his motorbike breaks down, and trying to cajole him into trading in his tapes, only for the older man to give him money. Hirayama forms a brief friendship with Aya over music, and it is via music that the older man's friendship with his regular bar's owner (Enka singer Sayuri Ishikawa) is expressed.

Yet, many of Hirayama's acquaintances feel surface level only: we see him as a regular at a izakaya but never see him converse with the owner, we see him encounter the same woman during his lunches in the grounds of a small temple, sneaking furtive glances but never speaking to her, we see him spend time in the local bathhouse, but he never speaks to the other patrons. His relationship with his relatives is equally frosty; his niece arrives suddenly at his door, and spends a couple of days with him, and whilst they slowly begin to warm to each other, she is positively alien to his quiet and ordered world, a phone-wielding teenager who disrupts the cycle of his days; the arrival of Hirayama's sister, who clearly comes from an affluent background, is particularly disquieting, suggesting a past for Hirayama that he has run away from, trading wealth for personal freedom. It is easy, perhaps, for an audience to bring their own prejudices, for an audience to consider Hirayama as living a half-existence, unable, or unwilling to break from this cycle, and lesser for it.

Perfect Days considers the fleeting things in life, and how to enjoy them

Yet, Perfect Days is not a film of great character arcs; its true beauty is in the fleeting moments of Hirayama's days, in the music he listens to, in the encounters with other people, in, as the film was called in Japan, komorebi, the ephemerality of sunshine through trees. Around this ephemerality, Wenders and cinematographer Franz Lustig find this tiny moments of beauty, to which the ever-expressive Yakusho reacts, photographing the dappling of shade, taking tiny seedlings back to his small flat, and almost always when he is not working or driving, looking upwards, to take in his surroundings. It is where the influence of Yasujiro Ozu's work, especially Tokyo Story is most apparent. Much effusive commentary has been made, many focusing upon a westernised "self-help" idea of Japanese philosophy and life, of Hirayama's slower-paced life, of his enjoyment of the moment.

Yet, regardless of how we regard the way Hirayama is living his life, who among us can not empathise with him for finding moments of peace, or beauty, among the nine-to-five? Perfect Days is not merely a portrait of a man living his life at his own pace, but a film about trying to find these small moments in life to slow down and admire the world around us.

Rating: Highly Recommended

Perfect Days is available in the UK via streaming and on DVD from Mubi, on streaming in the US via Hulu, and on BluRay from Criterion.

Next week, and indeed next month, Music(als) be the food of love as we travel to the streets of New York for the "starcross'd lovers" of West Side Story.