Perfect Days
The city and the trees. These are the first two things we see in Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days (2023): a wide shot of Tokyo at dawn, and an angle looking up at a leafy canopy against a dark blue sky. The former feels like an establishing shot, the latter like a mental image—fitting, since we next see the protagonist, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), opening his eyes in his modest home, awakened by the sounds of a solitary street sweeper outside. Perfect Days lives, in essence, between these two tableaux. It’s a city symphony about a man who appreciates the patches of nature and light he can find in his concrete world, and it’s a film about how everyday existence drifts into our dream lives.
Perfect Days also happens to be a movie about bathrooms. Its impetus was an invitation that Wenders received in 2022 to visit Tokyo Toilet, a collaborative project to build seventeen unique, high-tech public bathrooms—each conceived by an acclaimed architect, artist, or designer—in the ward of Shibuya. Wenders, whose deep and abiding fascination with Japan is well known, immediately saw the possibilities for a fiction feature. Wenders’ last feature Anselm took years to shoot. By contrast Wenders and cinematographer Franz Lustig shot Perfect Days, handheld, in sixteen days.
Yet there’s nothing rushed or undernourished about Perfect Days. In fact, it might be the most patient film Wenders has ever made. The camera takes its time lingering on Hirayama’s face and his methodical, graceful movements, watching him as he quietly goes about his daily routine and his job as a bathroom cleaner. He wakes up every morning, spritzes his flowers, puts on his Tokyo Toilet jumpsuit, drinks his breakfast, and drives his cramped van through the streets, listening to old cassette tapes of the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, and Otis Redding. At each stop, he shows dedication to his work: he wipes down every corner of the bathrooms, diligently cleans the retractable bidets, and even uses a little mirror to ensure he has covered all the tough-to-get spots.
It would be difficult to imagine a less “cinematic” subject. Perfect Days has very little story or traditional character development. Instead, it has Koji Yakusho—a revered Japanese actor who has played everything from cops to samurais, from frustrated office workers to murderous madmen—portraying that most elusive of figures: a contented and peaceable human being. Hirayama doesn’t say much, and his face betrays no particular inner unrest. Instead, he works, he observes, he smiles, he glows. The actor conveys happiness, but he doesn’t forsake the mystery required to keep us captivated.
During his lunch breaks, Hirayama looks up at the trees, fascinated by the delicate dance of sunlight on the leaves, snapping photos of it with an old film camera. A title at the end of the movie defines the Japanese word komorebi, which refers to the way light and shadow filter through foliage—something that “only exists once, at that moment.” Hirayama’s black-and-white pictures, which he edits ruthlessly and keeps tucked away in meticulously organized boxes, all seem to be attempts to capture this impermanent phenomenon. He’s an artist, but we don’t sense that he will ever do anything with these photographs. They themselves are, in a way, impermanent. In the film’s periodic “dream installation” passages, orchestrated by Donata Wenders (the director’s wife and an artist in her own right), Hirayama’s photos are interspersed with images from his daily life—creating the only moments when the film seems to leave the material present. But unlike most dream sequences in cinema, these do not offer any clues about our hero’s psyche. If anything, they reflect a mind at ease with itself.
In cinema, anonymity is usually a form of tragedy or a temporary cover for greatness. But Hirayama seems perfectly content with his unassuming routine, and Wenders films him with a subtle sense of awe. Watching him, we might feel envy for a man who has the time to fully enjoy his music and books and the pleasures of nature. Is such simplicity not the stuff of so many of our own dreams?
Is it not also the dream of so many of Wenders’ protagonists? The director was acclaimed early in his career for Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1975), and Kings of the Road (1976), a trilogy of road movies featuring alienated characters who shed their old lives and set out to find something indefinable. In that sense, Perfect Days feels like a summational of Wenders’ career, an end point for all those early wanderers. Hirayama has found the presence that Wenders’ previous characters were looking for. Many if not all of Wenders’ films are about the question of “how to live”. Perfect Days is the answer to that question.
Hirayama’s past is largely unrevealed but a sliver of it emerges quietly in the second half of the film when his teenage niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano), suddenly shows up at his house after running away from home. She hints briefly at a dispute that led Hirayama himself to leave home many years ago. Later, Niko’s mother (Yumi Aso) arrives to collect her in a nice car with a private chauffeur, suggesting that perhaps Hirayama also comes from wealth. “Are you really cleaning toilets?” his sister asks, baffled and maybe a little embarrassed. We learn that Hirayama had some sort of conflict with his father, but this is all we get of his past. Wenders doesn’t dwell on it, nor does he suggest any great traumas or tragedies.
A conventional drama about a runaway teen going to live with her withdrawn uncle would surely end with her bringing him out of his shell and opening him up to the world. Instead, Niko cleans toilets with Hirayama and finds herself drawn to his life. When she asks if they can go to the ocean, he says that she can go next time. When she asks what he means by that, he replies, “Next time is next time. Now is now.” There is a hint of severity in his statement, a refusal to dream bigger. But these words are also a brief and beautiful expression of his principles. To live in the present, one must set aside both the past and the future.
The Skytree tower, which shows up repeatedly in Perfect Days as a distant, aloof symbol of the life that Hirayama is not leading. Skytree might be impressive, but it is fixed and unchanging, and it does not sway in the wind or dance in the sunlight. It can never be a real tree, and it will never provide a moment of komorebi. Hirayama has no use for it. But maybe its constant presence here is a reminder to the director of his own journey toward simplicity. Surely, if there are angels hovering over Tokyo (as there were over Berlin in Wenders’ beloved 1987 film Wings of Desire), they would be perched somewhere near that tower, looking down longingly at the beautiful bustle below. I won’t spoil the ending, which sounds funny for a film with so little plot, but it’s a treasure. it’s an admission that happiness is elusive—and that even those who find it must work to keep it.
