There is great honor in a job well done. That is true even if (especially if?) your job is cleaning toilets. Kōji Yakusho’s Hirayama, the protagonist of German director’s Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, must truly believe that. Because he treats his job—cleaning Tokyo’s truly fascinating public toilets—with such a sense of vigor and seriousness (he even checks under the commode with a mirror to ensure he cleaned everything) that he must truly find great honor in doing it well. But he also seems to find A desire to remain hidden in plain sight?something else in it. Comfort? Escape? The movie lets us know there’s something deeper at work but never fully reveals what it is. Instead, we simply get to wonder at this simple-yet-remarkably complex man and his regimented life and hope for just a little more for him as we see his guard come down ever so slightly as real people cross his path.
For middle-aged Hirayama, six days of the week are exactly the same. He wakes, folds up his sleeping mat, waters his small collection of plants, dresses for work, stops at the vending machine outside his building for a can of coffee, and gets in his van to head to work. The only change each day is which song from his ultra-cool 60s/70s’ tape collection he’ll play on his way to work. He works hard, putting up with a younger, less industrious co-worker. His lunch is the same thing on the same park bench, where he takes a single picture of the leaves above him with his old point-and-shoot camera. After work, he cleans up at the bathhouse, eats at the same food stall while watching a ballgame, and reads whatever classic paperback he has that week before going to bed. And he does this every day. Except for one weekend day which is reserved for a different set of tasks…which, of course, is the same every week. If man is a creature of habit, Hirayama is the manliest man of us all.
But then, despite his fastidiousness, life starts to encroach on his order. His coworker gets Hirayama to help him out with his pursuit of a girl. Hirayama lets the girl borrow one of his treasured cassettes because the music touches her. Later, his niece, who he has not seen in some time, has run away from home and wants to stay with him. He introduces her to his way of life and the little pleasures he finds in the mundane. As the niece’s mother shows up to collect her, we get the barest glimpse that Hirayama’s life is not one of necessity—at least physical necessity—but a choice, a response to something in his past that makes the comfort of his simple, structured life essential to his well-being.
Perfect Days could certainly have been tricky to make engaging because of the monotony of the life it’s portraying. That it never feels monotonous is a testament to its star and its director. Yakusho deservedly won the Best Actor award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of Hirayama. It’s truly a masterful performance. Yakusho gives us the fullest possible of range of human emotion—pride, joy, annoyance, and pain, and often at the same time. All of those have to be intensely felt but also outwardly muted, for Hirayama would never do anything as brazen as letting his true emotions be seen. Yet you feel all of them with him even as you long for something more for him that he doesn’t even want for himself.
Yakusho’s brilliance is matched by that of Wim Wenders. Wenders (who also co-wrote the movie with Japanese writer Takuma Takasaki) may be one of our best directors for letting the realness of humanity touch. From his one-two punch of 80s humanist classics Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire to his docs exploring the intersection of art and emotion like Pina and Buena Vista Social Club, Wenders loves to tell stories about people being people. That sounds weird…aren’t all stories about people about that? Not really. Wenders’ characters don’t just serve a narrative, they really are the narrative. Perfect Days, like its predecessors in his filmography, aren’t about what Hirayama does, but about who he is. And that that is truly engrossing is a testament to Wenders’ time-tested abilities.
Any review of Perfect Days also has to give props to its amazing soundtrack. The Animals, Lou Reed, Otis Redding, The Kinks, and so on, are a time capsule into Hirayama’s psyche. As for many of us, he was made in part by the soundtrack of the formative years of his life. These songs suggest a less-restrained past. And even as he has moved on from it, he cannot leave the feelings evoked by these songs. It also helps that he apparently had wicked awesome taste, because the soundtrack is phenomenal on its own.
Fortunately, despite being helmed by a German director, Japan selected Perfect Days as its submission for Best International Film at this year’s Academy Awards. And the Academy did its job and nominated it for that award. This means that a lot more American audiences will see it as it become more available. Which is a great thing, because Perfect Days lives up to its title, a humanely beautiful little film that is just about perfect.
Perfect Days was just released in major U.S. markets this week and will be expanding to other theaters soon.
(Photo credit: NEON)