Apr 7

Apr 7 Wim Wenders’ “Perfect Days”

Drama, Hulu, Japanese, Mature, Spouse Approved

We follow Hirayama as he cleans toilets in Tokyo. He gets up in his modest apartment, brushes his teeth, trims his mustache, mists his houseplants, buys a can of coffee from a vending machine near his front door, and drives away to work after selecting a cassette tape to play while on the road.

Methodically he cleans public toilets, one after the other, many located near roads or parks, and always busy. What’s going through his head is never really clear, but his routine and how he approaches it, day after day, paints a picture of a calm, deliberate, and peaceful person, always polite, always careful.

When he emerges from his front door every morning we get a brief glimpse of how he approaches his life: he looks around, smiles, and then he’s on his way. No excitement, no dread, but a sense of comfortable, low-key anticipation.

We do occasionally witness his fleeting relationships with others as he goes about his routine: a nod to a vagrant in a city park; another nod to a young woman eating her lunch; helping a lost child find his mother; saying hello to the server at his regular restaurant; picking up prints off the rolls of black and white film he gets developed at a local hole-in-the-wall shop.

We do get some variation in his daily routine which also manages to reinforce his own relationships with events and other people. A troubled co-worker needs money and his young runaway niece shows up on his doorstep seeking shelter.

We see his dreams at night after he reads for a bit; they are black and white and involve overlapping images of trees and clouds.

Words that come to mind about this film: contemplative; deliberate; no sharp edges; interesting; reassuring; and mysterious.

I mention “mysterious” only because it’s hard to watch this film without wondering about Hirayama’s backstory. Why has he selected this lifestyle? What, if anything, did he do before? His brief encounter with his sister, who comes to retrieve his runaway niece, raises more questions than it answers.

But do such mysteries reduce one’s enjoyment of the film? I don’t think so. What we experience here is a beautifully crafted and photographed record of one human who seems to be at peace with the world. His routines are practiced and meaningful to him. That he cleans toilets for a living is almost beside the point. I get the impression that he could be performing just about any mundane and repetitive task, and come to love it.

My only other real familiarity with director Wim Wenders’ work is his dreamlike Wings of Desire about an angel who, while walking among humans and providing comfort, develops a desire to become human. The story is quite different but shares some similarities, including the treatment of mundane events with respect and brief glimpses of the varied personalities one encounters throughout one’s day.

In Perfect Days we see how one human has adjusted to life, not with complacency but with respect and regard for ordinary life events. Perhaps the filmmaker’s point is to illustrate what can occur when one focuses on the now and not on the before or after.