“The gods also live here,” Heraclitus told some travelers who came to visit the great philosopher and were perplexed to find him not concentrating on his work but warming himself next to a baker’s oven. The anecdote was collected by Aristotle and glossed by Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism. Yes, there is also transcendence in the most everyday things, if one knows how to look for it; Yes, beauty also lies in the smallest things, if the eye knows how to look. In Perfect Days (opens in theaters on January 12), his most successful film in decades, Wim Wenders (Düsseldorf, 1945) has found transcendence and beauty in the streets of Tokyo. A beautiful film that barely tells anything, but contains a world.
The origin of the project is so curious that it deserves to be told: the Japanese had commissioned various public toilets with various avant-garde designs for the Tokyo Olympics. With the delays of the pandemic, this original architectural commitment was in danger of being forgotten. Takuma Takasaki, a friend of Wenders – and producer and co-writer of the film – invited him to visit him in Tokyo to see those toilets. Perhaps they would be suitable for a photographic series (the filmmaker is also a very notable photographer) or for a documentary. Wenders saw the toilets and said that there were no photos or a documentary, that they were going to make a feature-length fiction film about them. The plot, summarized in a pedestrian way, is as follows: a solitary man spends his routine work days moving from one toilet to another in a small van to clean them. Can you make a beautiful and transcendent feature film with such a story? The short answer is yes.
Hirayama, the toilet cleaner from Perfect Days, lives alone in a very austere way, he speaks little, observes a lot, reads books in cheap paperback editions, listens to analog music on old cassettes during his commute, and each day of his life follows a methodical succession. of routines, which begins when he leaves the house, looks at the sky and smiles. He is neither repelled nor alienated by his work, not only does he not find it humiliating, but he does it conscientiously, as a dedicated service to others. He has not been imposed on him, he chose him as part of a series of personal decisions whose reasons we barely glimpse through his niece and his sister. He lives with very little and is happy.
Hirayama is brought to life by the veteran Japanese actor Kôji Yakusho, who deserved the award for best performance at the last Cannes Film Festival, because without barely speaking, without barely moving a facial muscle, he breathes life and nuance into this quiet and contemplative character.
The film reiterates his daily rituals: the morning can of coffee that he takes out of a vending machine, the meal in a nondescript joint in an underground market, the visit to the laundromat, to the traditional public baths, now only frequented by the elderly… Omnipresent , the other protagonist: the metropolis of Tokyo, a city of infinite road networks, in the midst of whose chaos there are small havens of peace in the form of parks.
Narrative development is minimal; in fact, the script was very schematic and was improvised a lot. The story advances through the accumulation of tiny details, minimal gestures, fleeting encounters: Hirayama collects buds from future trees in the parks and caresses them in small paper pots in his house; he helps a lost child and is rewarded by his smile; When he has lunch on a park bench he always runs into a woman who eats in silence; He contemplates the sky and photographs the branches of the trees in analogue, then takes the film to develop and keeps in a box the images that he decides not to break: preserved moments. The tapes he listens to throughout the film are Wenders’ ideal soundtrack: songs by Van Morrison, Patti Smith, The Animals, the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Undergroud, Otis Reding, the Kinks, James Brown… and, of course, Lou Reed’s Perfect Day.
The protagonist interacts with his young and excited assistant at work, with his girlfriend, with his niece who has run away from home, with the bookseller who makes literary recommendations and with the owner of a tiny tavern. Through the latter he will meet a character with whom, in one of the prodigious final scenes, he will play at stepping on the shadows, an echo of childhood that tells us about the transience of time and moments of happiness.
Wenders, who in the seventies and eighties of the last century was a heavyweight who chained major works – In the course of time, The American friend, Paris, Texas, The sky over Berlin – later entered a long erratic phase in which , except for a few documentaries and some reasonable works of fiction like Lisbon Story (which has more than one point of contact with Perfect Days), seemed to have lost its way. With this new film he proves to be in top shape at seventy-eight years old. He gives us two magical hours in which hardly anything happens and yet everything happens: life itself. It seems simple, but it is not. Managing to keep the viewer riveted in their seat with so little is extremely difficult, something only within the reach of a master.
Perfect Days is a work about contemplating the beauty that awaits us lurking around every corner if we still know how to look, about the poetry that nestles in the everyday. About a man who has decided to let go of his burden and live with very little, enjoying the little things. And in this way he has achieved happiness. Wenders has filmed a Zen movie. The culmination of his long-standing love for Japan. If you want to start the year off right, don’t miss it.