Perfect Days
Throughout his unbelievably diverse career, Wim Wenders has been as inspired by Japan where two of his 1980s documentaries are set, along with a portion of his 1991 epic lament for earthly life “Until the End of the World” as he has by the United States. Japan suggests serenity, or ideas about serenity certain strands of Asian philosophy make it a plausible place to look for that or live those thoughts and Mr. Ozu’s implacable camera style has often served as a model for Mr. Wenders. In this late film, “Perfect Days,” which is orderly, ascetic and culturally rich in ways that seem typical of older people in Tokyo but perhaps only there, Mr. Wenders shows us an older person in Tokyo who works in sanitation.
Koji Yakusho plays Hirayama, who cleans high-end public toilets in Shibuya. He’s a trim guy with salt and pepper hair and a meekness under which you see the powerful charisma that’s been put under a willed bushel. Every morning he gets up in his small apartment and drives a van into town playing one of his cassette tapes on the car stereo.
Some selections: The Animals’ version of “The House of the Rising Sun;” “Pale Blue Eyes,” from Velvet Underground; “Sunny Afternoon,” by the Kinks. The Kinks have an important place in Mr. Wenders’ oeuvre; in his classic “The American Friend,” Bruno Ganz sings along softly with their “Too Much on My Mind” in his imperfectly safe atelier during another one of his imperfect days. And Lou Reed (guess which) has another song on this soundtrack here and also appeared in Mr. Wenders’ post-Cold War international relations sprawl-comedy-drama-thingy “Faraway So Close!,” which had a cameo from Mikhail Gorbachev.
In his car, looking at the sun coming up, Hirayama, all alone and with the music softly rocking him as he drives, seems to revel in the sheer nowness of this moment of being alive.
And while it is largely a solitary existence, the specifics of which are those that speak to a possibly male brand of wish fulfillment that is: meaningful solitude wanted in tandem with the wish, after a certain number of years on earth, to be left alone by the world itself there’s something about it that signals to anyone who has ever felt blue. Hirayama only listens to cassette tapes, in a different type of character this would seem nearly insufferable as an emblem of hipster fetishization (and that’s something the movie actually takes up), but with Hirayama you catch more of an “everything in its right place” vibe.
Very little happens. But much beauty goes by our hero during his working day: parks where some of these designer toilets are placed; parks where other things happen, a dark little bar-restaurant and its quiet female proprietor (with whom Hirayama forms an affinity that is not exactly reciprocated nor exactly unreciprocated). At night he reads, and when he dreams he dreams in black and white imagery fabricated through collaboration between Mr. Wenders and his wife Donata, a photographer.
Some reviewers have found Mr. Wenders’ squeaky clean portrayal of the life of a man who cleans toilets for a living somewhat evasive: These installations may be practically art objects (which reflects their treatment here), but they are waste disposal systems nonetheless. I’d say let’s not get too salty or gross about it given “Kings of the Road,” I don’t think Mr. Wenders owes us anything in the shit department.
In this late ‘70s film the lead character relieves himself on a beach on screen, the action is depicted naturalistically and nonchalantly, in long shot; nevertheless, one commenter on Roger’s review pronounced the scene as “sick.” Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, I guess.
But beyond what he does not show, there are a few critics I’ve seen who can’t abide the concomitant attitude of Hirayama and the movie itself. Which I took to be “acceptance is the key.” For some the distinction between acceptance and complacency is non-existent, and I get that. Nevertheless, I was consistently moved by this picture and by the serenity sought and often found by its protagonist.
In any event, the movie has its mysteries, and these mysteries look to another side of life, one not so serene. The patience and tolerance that Hirayama shows his chowderhead colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto) is extreme enough to border on self abnegation. When Hirayama’s teenage niece shows up at his door, we get a hint of familial unease. The girl is mildly curious about her uncle’s way of life, and borrows one of his book, a collection of Patricia Highsmith short stories. A little later, the girl, Niko, tells Hirayama that she particularly admired the story “The Terrapin.”
The movie itself doesn’t divulge this but that story is about a kid whose mother boils a turtle (which indeed had been brought home to be eaten); the kid retaliates by stabbing his mother to death. When Hirayama’s sister shows up to claim her daughter the dialogue between siblings alludes to a former mode of life very different from Hirayama’s current situation. Is he doing a living amends? And if so for what? “I like to think you killed a man, it’s the romantic in me,” Captain Renault says to Rick Blaine in “Casablanca,” speculating as to what Rick has been running away from. One again thinks of the Highsmith-based “The American Friend,” and the anti romantic killing in that film, and wonders what Hirayama might be running from.
The movie reminded me of what Peter Bogdanovich said of Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”: that it “is not a young man’s movie; it has the wisdom and poetic perceptions of an artist knowingly nearing the end of his life and career.” The wisdom and poetry here are just as real and just as thoroughly felt.
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