Perfect Days (2023) - by Ivan Webster
Koji Yakusho is Hirayama, a solitary who savors living yet struggles to connect
Perfect Days (2023)
In theaters and streaming
While following a story on screen, we sometimes experience an exceptional pleasure only movies can provide. On a large screen, we soak up a magnificent face, a beautiful camera subject.
The hoary, classic example is Greta Garbo. Whatever her character wanted, our eyes wanted more of her. Whoever tired of looking at her face?
This isn’t a rapture we can predict or prepare for. Suddenly, there it is. I had to recall that Garbo-like pull in order to understand how in Perfect Days the lead actor Koji Yakusho kept my eyes transfixed and made this movie mesmerizing. (He won the Best Actor award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.)
He’s been given the opposite of a glamorous role. Hirayama is a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Legendary German director Wim Wenders and co-screenwriter Takuma Takasaki are careful from the outset to keep us in everyday Tokyo. This is no tourist’s eye view of a great metropolis.
How the ordinary becomes “perfect” forms the drama here, stoking the tensions under the movie’s pleasing surface. Hirayama is only one struggling citizen among millions. In the beehive of apartment buildings and expressways surrounding him, he’s just a dot. We’re getting a privileged view of an entirely unprivileged man.
Hirayama is rarely offscreen, and whenever he is, we instantly miss him. That creates a strange urgency, since Yakusho never acts with large, sudden gestures. That’s a sound choice, since this isn’t a remotely “melodramatic” role.
But by his sheer presence, no matter how turned inward, the actor commands the screen. No one ever called Humphrey Bogart a beautiful camera subject, like Garbo. Yet whenever Bogart pulled a gun, laughed off a threat or went after a dame, you couldn’t take your eyes off him.
A similar, much quieter, connection happens here. Simplicity isn’t simple in Hirayama’s stoic life. It’s immaculate. As we see him go through what’s obviously an undeviating morning routine, his compact, meticulously tidy flat has an austerity that reflects the man.
Hirayama is deeply absorbed in the inner life, where he can be hard to reach
We can’t help noticing there’s no sign of a computer or television, only rows of carefully shelved books. After neatly folding his bedding, brushing his teeth, gathering keys and pocket change, what seems like a ritual is completed with buying vending machine coffee and climbing into his little bug of a blue van to drive off to his daily rounds.
One can only imagine the permissions from Tokyo city officials Wenders had to secure to be able to show us Hirayama’s professional diligence. Each of the many small public bathrooms he tends has a design, an architecture, all its own.
They’re modernist huts of varying materials and designs. One has walls dotted with wooden ovals, another is made up of sleek full-length windowed booths whose walls with the flick of a switch turn opaque, making an occupant invisible to public view.
Hirayama mirrors this sense of civic discretion, even if the populace, unsurprisingly, is indifferent to it, and to him. He cleans toilets, fixtures, mirrors and floors with eagle-eyed attention to detail. Not a surface goes untouched by his brush, sponge or mop.
He’s not just doing his job. As we watch him work, we sense him making things right for himself. Never mind the uncaring public. His cleaning toilets elevates the people who use them, even as we see them disregard his consummate service.
Wenders and his cinematographer Franz Lustig keep the images hard, bright and crystalline, without any sentimental “glow”. Everything is vivid yet calm and uninsistent. Just like Hirayama.
Doing a menial job doesn’t mean he lives a valueless life. So, how does rudimentary work take on an almost missionary fervor? Hirayama’s airheaded young assistant Takashi (Tokio Emoto in a giddy, charming performance) advises Hirayama: Why sweat it? The toilet facilities they clean are only going to get dirty again.
This deeply withdrawn loner gets exactly the vibrating actor he needs here.
I don’t want to lull you falsely; this is a long movie. You feel all of its two hours and four minutes. It doesn’t try your patience, but assuredly, respectfully, calls on it.
But in Yakusho’s spellbinding performance, Hirayama’s low status job isn’t just the most important part of his life; at work is the only time he feels any useful connection to others.
For the first hour we never hear him speak. He plays cassette tapes in his van, with the likes of Lou Reed, Otis Redding and Van Morrison filling his head. Decades old pop music comforts this stranger in his own land.
And by the end of his workday Hirayama doesn’t feel demeaned but lifted up. He happily takes his evening meals at a small soup shop where the cook cheerfully greets him.
Or he stops by a bar that serves more elaborate fare, with regulars who know him and a familiar hostess who dotes on him. He always has a book with him. “You’re such an intellectual,” she gently teases.
He’s a man apart from the common run who in no way wants to stand out. Luckily for us, this deeply withdrawn loner gets exactly the vibrating actor he needs here.
Yakusho, like Bogart, is blessed with one of those indefinable “movie faces”. His luminous bright eyes can shine with wonder at the city’s small beauties as he drives from one installation to the next. Or glisten with minimal, barely-there tears when he falls silent or lies awake at night with a book cast aside in the lamplight.
He’s also a man out of his time. He listens only to vintage cassette tapes. He has no idea what Spotify is. A devoted amateur photographer, he uses an old camera, not a phone, to shoot photos, especially of trees catching the sunlight at shifting hours of the day. We eventually see he’s carefully labeled boxes of photos he’s taken for years.
Hirayama opens up in unexpected ways when his niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) comes to visit
This depth of secreted feelings is rooted back in time. We finally get a clue about why when his teenage niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) arrives unannounced, asking if she can stay with him. It’s been years since they’ve seen one another.
Hirayama is pleased to see Niko yet reluctant to let a figure from his past into his ordered present. She goes to work with him, and through her eyes we see more clearly how separated from nearly everyone her uncle has become. Cleaning toilets has turned into a hideaway, a desperately enclosed inner space.
When his wealthy estranged sister Aya (Aoi Yamada) appears with a limousine to collect her runaway daughter, we learn fragments of what’s driven him into radical isolation. He wants his sister to know that he’s thrived, not withered, by tenaciously staying apart.
Performing his job dauntlessly, listening to music intently, reading books far into the night, and carefully taking photos aren’t flights from real life. On the contrary, his circumscribed pluck fills him up inside, where no one else can see or doubt it.
Showing such airtight introspection outwardly is the moviemaking challenge Wenders takes up here. He’s pulled off one of the great interior dramas in movie history, akin to Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) or Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). (Also, listen closely to the impeccable sound design; every rustle, brush or click is distinct and crisp.)
As in those movies, Wenders shows us a man who seems to be only clinging to life, but somehow, in however pinched a measure, remains fully alive.
I don’t want to lull you falsely; this is a long movie. You feel all of its two hours and four minutes. It doesn’t try your patience, but assuredly, respectfully, calls on it. It’s in no hurry.
By the end we know Hirayama will wake up tomorrow and repeat his inviolate routine. On the soundtrack when you hear Nina Simone murmur and wail “Feeling Good”, the joy and sadness crossing his face flicker like moments, here, then gone, but due back another day, and again the day after that.
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