Perfect Days (2023)
Directed by Wim Wenders
Hirayama is content with his life as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine, he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Through unexpected encounters, he reflects on finding beauty in the world.
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What critics say influenced Perfect Days
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)
Directed by Chantal Akerman
Visuals Themes
The first hour of the film essentially boils down to sequencing that’s clearly inspired by Chantal Akerman’s film, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. While Hirayama has certainly held and excelled at this job for a while, he seems deeply content. And although it may beckon the viewer to wonder just how he ended up in the position he finds himself in, more likely than not, it doesn’t really matter.
This fascination with the most ordinary daily rituals inevitably recalls Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.
“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.
Tokyo is captured as a pristine metropolis, with focus on the constantly utilized network of roadways (reminiscent of sequences utilized in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, 1972).
It's a scene that rivals Bob Hoskins' performance at the end of The Long Good Friday, albeit creating vastly different tones.
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There's a bit of Vittorio de Sica's micro-texture-minded sensibility swimming around in it, and the impression that Wenders imparts of Hirayama as a god-like figure who surveys the rest of us flawed humans from afar brings to mind the protagonist of Wings of Desire.
Wenders—who cowrote the script with Takuma Takasaki—is one of those filmmakers you’ve got to keep your eye on. His 1987 Wings of Desire, made shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, told the story of an angel, played by a soulfully leonine Bruno Ganz, who observes the lives of humans from a high perch above Berlin, only to find himself longing to become human too. The film became a touchstone for a whole generation, speaking to the restlessness and longing that young people of the Reagan era believed to be exclusive to them, although of course it wasn’t.
Perfect Days is directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders, an artist whose greatest films (Paris, Texas or Wings of Desire, to name just two) explore the quiet, unspoken moments of life and regret and second chances.
In Wenders’s new film Perfect Days, his blithest and most uplifting since Wings of Desire (1987), his hero Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) is reading The Wild Palms as well, along with other books, including a collection of Patricia Highsmith’s short stories.
Wim Wenders is a titan of European cinema with acclaimed German language films like Kings of the Road, Wings of Desire and Wrong Move, he is perhaps best known for his English language film Paris, Texas.
Wenders, making his best fictional feature in years and a movie every bit as magnificent as his Berlin-set 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire, goes zen himself with his handling of Perfect Days. He's happy with cinematographer Franz Lustig (who also lensed his most-recent documentary Anselm) largely peering on documentary-style patiently and gracefully, taking in the ins and outs of Hirayama's days as serenely as Hirayama navigates them.
Inspired by their beauty (one has different colored transparent stalls which turn opaque when occupied, another projects glowing patterns while yet another looks like a grouping of modernist huts), Wenders instead, along with cowriter Takuma Takasaki, came up with an idea for a fictional film about a man who cleans these toilets for a living, his lead character's name taken from Ozu's “Tokyo Story,” a film dear to Wenders' heart.
…the minimalistic storyline brings to mind films such as Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland and Celine Song’s Past Lives, with their reliance on poetic visual language over dialogue. Zhao’s Oscar-winning film depicts a similar character study of the everyman/woman, and a contemplative appreciation for the small things in life.
So was Paterson and Jarmusch's film before that one, Only Lovers Left Alive, though those are thornier works.
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Shot by Franz Lusting (who has lensed several late period Wenders features, including 2004’s Land of Plenty and 2005’s Don’t Bother to Knock), Tokyo is captured as a pristine metropolis, with focus on the constantly utilized network of roadways (reminiscent of sequences utilized in Tarkovsky’s Solaris, 1972).
In his most successfully realized narrative feature in years, Wim Wenders returns to the road in Perfect Days, a thematic motif upon which he built his early career with his thematic trilogy, Alice in the Cities (1974), Wrong Move (1974), and Kings of the Road (1975).
Wim Wenders is a titan of European cinema with acclaimed German language films like Kings of the Road, Wings of Desire and Wrong Move, he is perhaps best known for his English language film Paris, Texas.