Released in February 2024 in the U.S., legendary German filmmaker Wim Wenders’ latest tour de force Perfect Days isn’t getting much discussion as being among the best of the year.
That’s too bad, because this dreamy, intimate character study is as accomplished a movie as you’re likely to see in this or any year. Here are a few reasons why you should check out the movie in the waning days of 2024.
It has a bizarre origin story
Wenders, the shaman-like auteur whose epically beautiful Paris, Texas (1984) is among the best films of the ’80s, came to the project in as unlikely a manner as could be imagined. In 2021, Wenders was invited by the city of Tokyo to make a series of short informational films about their public toilets, which had been overhauled during the pandemic. New, high-quality public restrooms, built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, boasted innovative architecture and advanced technology.
Wenders, an odd choice for such an endeavor in any case, went in a different direction — a feature film about a toilet cleaner, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), whose repetitive daily routine driving from one public toilet to the next in a rickety van forms the core of the film’s story. Far from being deadening, the tale as told by Wenders is dynamic, gorgeous, and impressionistic, with new details about Hirayama being layered in gradually rather than front-loaded — he’s a lover of ’60s and ’70s music on cassettes, a talented amateur photographer, and has a mysterious high-achieving past that lends an air of quiet tragedy and resignation to his current pursuits.
The ’60s and ’70s score rocks (literally)
Those cassettes set the tone — the movie takes its name from Lou Reed’s similarly-titled Perfect Day; we also hear, played in Hirayama’s van, (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay, Sunny Afternoon, Brown Eyed Girl, Feeling Good, and The House of the Rising Sun. The songs are pointedly chosen — brilliant, naturally, but just bordering on the overplayed, qualifying as arty deep cuts only in non-English-speaking countries.
Hirayama’s depth, therefore, is double-sided; he is more complex than the passing observer might expect, but he is, also, ultimately a blessedly normal person reveling in his normality. When Wenders finally echoes the English-language tracks with a Japanese translation of House of the Rising Sun, sung by Sayuri Ishikawa, the point lands perfectly here in America, as the English-speaking audience feels the familiar-but-not-familiar frisson of a song you know bent just a few degrees in a new direction.
Is it so strange to make a film about toilets? By the same token, is it so strange to be a toilet cleaner? Hirayama’s sister Keiko, played by Yumi Asō, is befuddled by his new station in life, but why? Isn’t a man who goes about his necessary work with a studied consistency perfectly normal, and also perfectly beautiful?
It has optimism among generations
True to its title, Perfect Days’ greatest strength is its quiet, wondering optimism, the sense that Hirayama is putting a loving hand out into the universe regardless of whether he receives a response. (A long-form game of tic-tac-toe, left behind on a slip of paper in a toilet he cleans, allowing Hirayama and an unseen stranger to each play half of the game, literalizes this dynamic.)
Hirayama’s touching capacity to understand and empathize with the young — his assistant, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), Takashi’s sort-of-girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada) and Hirayama’s runaway niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano) — is further proof that this film is a gentle benediction by Wenders to a generation that too many elder filmmakers idly condemn. Even the movie’s devotion to analog technology is warm and nostalgic rather than crabby Luddite nonsense: Hirayama’s ubiquitous old-fashioned camera perfectly matches the one the teenage Niko uses just as often.
Perfect Days is one of the director’s best films
One comes away from the film with an overwhelming sense of Wenders’ bravery, both as a filmmaker unafraid to linger on quotidian details in the service of a complete portrait of a complex person and as a truly internationalist filmmaker. German by birth, he hasn’t made a film in his native language in nearly 20 years. Perfect Days, a Japanese-language movie, is Japan’s submission for the Oscars this year, the first time ever a film not made by a native Japanese has had that honor. Fitting, since this is a film about radical empathy.
Like Paris, Texas, Perfect Days pulls off the magic trick of leaving its protagonist devastated and alone at the end of its runtime without ever seeming like a bummer. Far from it; Harry Dean Stanton, in the former film, and Yakusho, in the latter, seem expanded by their brushes with tragedy and retreat into solitude, not compacted by them. With the help of his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Franz Lustig, Wenders dapples Yakusho’s uniquely expressive face with light and shadow filtered through ancient trees in Tokyo parks, framing Hirayama as being as fundamental and as ancient as nature.
Yakusho’s stunning performance
Yakusho, whose previous recognition in America was limited to a supporting role in Rob Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), is, in his colossal dignity and acting instrument of uncommon depth, a movie star of the old school. One could easily imagine Hirayama being played by Takashi Shimura, whose performances in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) and Ikiru (1952) were so assured and real they were almost comforting, like being exposed to the air of reality within the sealed box of film fiction. But it’s unlikely even Shimura could do better than Yakusho himself, whose performance quite deservedly won the Best Actor Award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
If you missed Perfect Days during its relatively brief theatrical run last winter, now’s the time to give it a try. Like many of Wenders’ films, its staying power creeps up on you, leaving you with a dream-reality with hazy outlines but a clearly defined heart.
Perfect Days is streaming on Hulu.