Wim Wenders follows a Tokyo toilet cleaner through a week of near-identical days and, thanks to Koji Yakusho’s almost wordless performance, makes the repetition hold. It is the best fiction film Wenders has made in years, and a little too fond of its hero’s calm.
Wim Wenders has been to Tokyo before: Tokyo-Ga, in 1985, was a documentary in which he went looking for the city Yasujiro Ozu had filmed and mostly failed to find it. Perfect Days is what happens when he stops looking and sits still. Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) cleans public lavatories. Wenders and his co-writer Takuma Takasaki watch him do it, day after day, for 124 minutes, and the bet is that a routine shown carefully enough becomes a life. It mostly pays off.
Yakusho says almost nothing. What he has instead is a face that notices things and does not say so: the nod to a child lost in a park, the mirror on a stick he uses to check under a rim, the way he stops with a can of coffee halfway to his mouth because the sky has done something. The film’s whole case, that a man scrubbing lavatories can be at peace and deserve two hours of our attention, rests on him, and he carries it without ever appearing to know he is carrying anything.
Franz Lustig shoots in a squarish 4:3 frame, which keeps the city out of the way and Hirayama’s face in the centre of it, and he shoots the mornings in the thin grey light before the sun has decided. The lavatories themselves, glass and cedar and concrete, each one different, are the only extravagance in the film. Towako Kuwajima’s production design keeps Hirayama’s flat down to a futon, a shelf of cassettes, a shelf of paperbacks and seedlings in a window. Daisuke Iga puts him in blue overalls with THE TOKYO TOILET across the back.
Toni Froschhammer’s editing is the quiet cleverness here. The day repeats, but each repeat is trimmed, so by the fourth morning we know the order of things and are allowed to skip ahead, and any change, a phone call at the wrong hour, a colleague who does not appear, lands like an alarm. That is how the film got us: we had settled into the pattern without noticing, and when it first broke we were more put out than a missed shift should make anyone. There is no composer. The songs Hirayama plays in the van do the work, Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” among them, and Wenders lets each one run long enough that we hear it the way Hirayama does.
What works less well is the young colleague, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who is late, broke and lovesick, and played at a pitch the rest of the film does not share. Aoi Yamada, as the girl he is chasing, gets one scene in the van with a cassette that is worth more than all of his. The dialogue, when it finally arrives, has a habit of sounding like a card in a gift shop; a line about now being now is repeated as if it were wisdom. And the film’s argument that a poor man can be content is softened by things it tells us about Hirayama in the second half, which we will not describe, except to say that they make his life look less like a fate and more like a decision, and a decision is a smaller thing to celebrate.
Wenders’s best fiction films, Paris, Texas in 1984 and Wings of Desire in 1987, were about men standing slightly outside their own lives and watching. This is the closest he has come to them in a long time. The debt to Ozu is paid openly: the low camera, the trains, the relative who arrives unannounced and stays, and nobody saying out loud what they feel about it.
What moved us most was the lunch hour. Hirayama sits under the same trees each day and photographs the light through the leaves with a small film camera, and we had not expected to care about a man photographing leaves. We did, because Lustig shows us the light as Hirayama sees it and Yakusho’s face tells us it is the reason he gets up.
It is a PG, and there is nothing in it a child could not see. Whether a child would sit through it is another matter. Watch it on a weekday evening when you have nowhere to be, and do not check the time; Hirayama would not.
