A realist drama told with a fairy-tale lightness, Wim Wenders’ latest is a ruminative slice of slow cinema that requires patience but rewards it with a gentle wash of warm emotions.
Set in the quieter corners of Tokyo’s bustling Shibuya district, Perfect Days follows Hirayama (13 Assassins’ Kōji Yakusho). He’s a middle-aged toilet cleaner, responsible for cleaning the city’s architecturally-designed, Wallpaper*-worthy public loos (they’re part of The Tokyo Toilet, a real-life urban renewal project). It’s a task this taciturn, diligent man approaches with the same care he affords his treasured household plants.
Like a Japanese Jeanne Dielman, Hirayama’s daily routine is carved in stone: pick up a coffee from the vending machine outside his small apartment, clamber into his van for his daily rounds, soundtracked by his collection of American new wave album on the car’s tape deck (yes, Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ gets an airing). It’s a solitary life where his daily tasks act as a kind of medicine against loneliness.
Wenders shows us those rigid parameters to his life in order to disrupt them with a patchwork of small but meaningful human encounters. Hirayama’s colleague (Emoto Tokio, broad) brings chaotic energy and a girl in tow, leaning on his boss to fund his date night by selling some of his treasured vintage cassettes. It feels like a false note when Hirayama aquiesces to a trip a second-hand record store. You know he’d as soon lose a limb as sell a single one.
Wim Wenders’ realist drama is told with a fairy-tale lightness
More affecting is a brief encounter with a lost child, a bond with the girl his colleague is chasing over a Patti Smith tune, and the eventual re-emergence of hitherto absent family members and clues about his unexplained past.
It all evokes the slowburn, observational style of Wender’s Alice in the Cities, carving out quiet moments that linger against a bustlingly oblivious cityscape. Beautiful acted by Japanese veteran Yakusho, it’s a character study with real depth. Maybe not top tier Wenders, but still one to linger over.
In US theaters now. In UK cinemas Feb 23.