Thoughts on Perfect Days

    On Hulu, I watched Perfect Days, a 2023 film directed by Wim Wenders and co-written by Wenders and Takuma Takasaki. It won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival, Best Actor for Kōji Yakusho and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. 

    It centers on Hirayama (Yakusho), who works as a public toilet cleaner in the upscale Shibuya neighborhood of Tokyo, Japan. The film has a very quiet, contemplative, peaceful pace like Jim Jarmusch's Paterson (2016), a film about a bus driver who lives the same daily routine and is content with his life. In this film, he lives in a small apartment, with a large music cassette collection of albums by American artists like The Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, The Animals, and Nina Simone. The music figures into the plot, as he plays his music in his car while working, and his co-worker's love interest, Aya (Aoi Yamada), requests to listen to Patti Smith and takes in her song "Redondo Beach." 

    He makes his rounds of The Tokyo Toilet, which were established post-pandemic at 17 locations in Shibuya, with unique designs, like flipping a lock that shutters the toilet enclosure for privacy. Hirayama is a quiet man, who is reserved and doesn't speak often, but is greatly communicative with his gestures and facial expressions. He gets his coffee from a vending machine outside of his apartment building, he chooses his music cassettes for the day to listen to, and he ends his days hanging out in a local bar, observing and people-watching. His younger co-worker, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), is trying to impress a potential date and keeps relying on Hirayama for help, begging as if any lost opportunity with her is the end of the world.

    Hirayama enjoys taking photographs of the sunlight through the branches at a shrine during his lunch break with an analog camera, and at night, he reads literature by William Faulkner, Patricia Highsmith, and Aya Kōda. He plays an ongoing game of tic-tac-toe with a stranger, leaving a piece of paper in one of the toilet stalls and playing the game back and forth throughout the film.

    The film gets even better once his teenage niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano) comes in unannounced, after a fight with her mother. She bonds well with her uncle, seeing beauty in the world through his eyes, and the actors have lovely chemistry together, that brings more serenity into the film, even as they both talk about having difficulty with their family history.

    The film is very minimalist, and it felt really relaxing to watch. Yakusho is excellent in this film, he has this calm, lived-in quality as Hirayama, and has this dignified, content aura to his performance. Yakusho is a well-renowned actor, best known for his roles in Shall We Dance? (1996), 13 Assassins (2010), and Cure (1997). This also may be one of my favorite films I've seen by Wim Wenders, next to 1984's Paris, Texas and 1991's Until the End of the World. He combines quiet character studies with contemporary music that makes it feel very inviting and engrossing, and was a lovely gem for me to watch.