Each new day, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) awakens with a smile. We see it about five or six times, followed by a fairly rigid though not by any means drab routine. He shaves and trims his moustache, sprays his plants and flowers, goes outside where he greets the day with another warm smile, buys a coffee from a little vending machine, and gets in his small blue van where he plays music off a cassette deck -typically classic western pop songs- on his way to work. He is a toilet cleaner for a series of public restrooms around Tokyo: he makes his rounds, politely stepping aside when people need to use the toilets, makes a move in a game of tic-tac-toe with an anonymous person on a slip of paper left inside a stall. Then he has his lunch on a park bench, taking a picture of the trees above him with a little camera. In the afternoon he patronizes a public bathhouse before cycling over to a little restaurant for dinner and a drink while watching baseball on the television. He ends his day in his bed reading by lamplight, before falling asleep, dreaming some abstract dreams, before beginning the next day in much the same fashion. With a smile.
There are some variations that pop up, a couple extra routines on his day off like dropping by a place where he can pick up his camera film, buying a new book when he finishes one at a used paperback store, or visiting a bar run by a woman he appears to have a mild crush on; but generally the life that we see in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days is very repetitive and monotonous -and yet Hirayama’s unmitigated contentment with it all rubs off affectionately. Wenders isn’t typically known for this kind of ponderousness -even Wings of Desire colours its musings in great emotion.But here he leans into the minute and the simple, entranced by the humble love for the beauty of life that his protagonist embodies.
A lot of it comes out of the ritual. Hirayama never gives voice to his philosophy -in fact he hardly speaks at all- but it is clear he treats every part of his life with a certain optimism and good faith. Yet in this he is not a completely feckless yes-man, asserting some degree of authority, notably over his assistant Takashi (Tokio Emoto), frequently late and distracted, consumed by his own world where Hirayama just takes in the one around him. Takashi is not open to that kind of tranquillity, though the girl he is obsessed about wooing, Aya (Aoi Yamada) very much is. When Takashi borrows Hirayama’s van to drive Aya to work, Hirayama patient in the back seat, Takashi’s talkative impulses are subdued by Aya’s simple pleasure in listening to one of Hirayama’s cassettes while gazing at the sky out the passenger window. Later, Hirayama finds something else of an unexpected kindred spirit in his niece Niko (Arisa Nakano), who stays with him for a few days after running away from home, drawn in to his lifestyle.
This and a small appearance later by Niko’s mother -Hirayama’s sister (Yumi Asō), are the only glimpses we get into his personal life and the hint of a sadness behind all the earnest contentment. We find that they have been estranged for some time, that she’d only heard what he did for a living, that their family is at least moderately wealthy, and their father possibly dying -which Hirayama doesn’t seem much moved by. A different film and a different filmmaker might expand on these modest details, but Wenders isn’t interested so much in Hirayama’s backstory -except perhaps as a contrast to where he is now.
It doesn't keep Hirayama at all though from being a thoroughly captivating character. Indeed, he is much more striking for his little mysteries. And Kōji Yakusho, who won the Best Actor award at Cannes, is entirely sublime in his subtleties. It is a performance that demands a certain aura of calm and pleasant quirkiness, and Yakusho pulls it off with the grace of a man who could have lived these days personally. By design this is a character who is so naturally warm and endearing, you want to just sit in silence with him, taking pictures of leaves or listening quietly to an old song. Even the anonymous opponent in his tic-tac-toe game, who never meets Hirayama personally, is implied to have been blessed by their connection.
Had Wenders made this movie thirty years ago, Hirayama would absolutely have been played by Chishū Ryū -the favourite actor of Yasujirō Ozu, one of Wenders's idols. And though the movie is stylistically and subject-wise nothing at all like an Ozu film, the Japanese master's influence can absolutely be felt in the meditative slowness of the pace, the emotional simplicity of the characters, and its deferral to ellipses for several dramatic moments. The flashes in monochrome that are Hirayama's dreams vaguely call back to the likes of Ozu, and other Japanese filmmakers of the 1950s and 60s -the symbolic meaning is a bit nebulous, but one can assume they pertain to some peaceful time for Hirayama, in childhood perhaps (one clear apparition is a child holding their mother's hand, another is of a woman's eyes). They are beautiful phantoms in any case. The Ozu touch that is most apparent though is the underlying humanity of the movie, which Wenders evokes quite stirringly.
It would be reductive to boil down Perfect Days to an elementary "stop and smell the roses" philosophy. There's an inkling of that for sure, but it doesn't so much advocate Hirayama's outlook as simply spotlight it without judgement. And yet Hirayama is not based on anyone in particular -why did Wenders create a character with such a perspective as this? There is a clue at the close of the end credits: “Komorebi is the Japanese word for the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. It only exists once, at that moment.” It is the imagery in his camera and in his dreams: a unique and fleeting beauty that he captures so he can preserve in his mind. In this, Hirayama is a caretaker of the komorebi; his simple pleasures and even his simple pains, which come out in the last act as some of his veneer slips, are expressions of a delicate balance maintained or in flux. He is a figure of an otherworldly insight and patience, though still inspiring in the light of Wenders and Yakusho's intricate craft.
The movie features a lot of good songs, like Patti Smith’s “Redondo Beach” (capturing Aya so much she briefly steals it off Hirayama) the Kinks’ “Sunny Afternoon” and Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl”. Most notable are The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun”, performed beautifully by Hirayama's beloved barmaid, and of course Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” -which gives the film its title. There is a soothing quality to each musical choice, enriching the atmosphere of Hirayama's ordered yet spontaneous world. Perfect Days is both of these, though it may not be apparent on the latter point to some audiences. Even to they however, the soul of this movie and of this character may well prove irresistible.
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