Veteran German New Wave pioneer Wim Wenders takes us on a tour of Tokyo’s public toilets for his first dramatic feature in six years. This might sounds like the punchline to a joke about how far the director of Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987) has slipped in critical standing since his revered, prize-winning career peak. But Perfect Days turns out to be a surprisingly charming, haunting, moving work with deliberate echoes of Japanese cinema legend Yasujiro Ozu.
With Wenders shifting focus to documentaries in his later career, this Cannes competition contender is only his third fiction feature in the last 15 years. With its meditative mood and wistful, personal tone, Perfect Days is likely to meet a warmer welcome than the poorly received flops Every Thing Will Be Fine (2015) and Submergence (2017), reconnecting the 77-year-old auteur with his art-house roots.
Perfect Days began as a proposal from a Japanese company inviting Wenders to shoot a series of short fictional films centred around a recently installed array of architecturally striking public toilets in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, rooted in the idea of promoting Japan’s omotenashi culture of hospitality and public service. Instead of the shorts, Wenders suggested making a full dramatic feature on the same subject, all linked by a single protagonist. Working from a screenplay co-written with Takuma Takasaki, with dialogue entirely in Japanese, he shot the film in just 17 days in a window during post-production for his other Cannes entry this year, the 3D artist-profile documentary Anselm.
Invested with quiet dignity by Koji Yakusho (Babel, Memoirs of a Geisha), the film’s hero is Hirayama, a taciturn Tokyo widower in his late sixties who lives a monkish existence of silence, solitude and diligent daily routine. He works as a toilet cleaner in Shibuya, moving between public parks, either alone or with his clownish young assistant Takashi (Tokio Emoto ). During his sporadic interactions with Takashi, his niece Niko (Arisa Nakano), a quietly flirtatious bar owner, a homeless man who sleeps in the park and others in his small orbit, Hirayama says little or nothing. This minimalist performance strains credulity at times, but it works on a more heightened poetic level. There are echoes here of Travis, Harry Dean Stanton’s mute desert wanderer in Paris, Texas, which may be deliberate.
Even if the modernist bathroom facilities in Perfect Days are not really the film’s dramatic focus, Wenders and cinematographer Franz Lustig (who also shot Anselm) observe them with an adoring eye. The star building here is architect Shigeru Ban’s ingenious high-tech block in Yoyogi Fukamachi Mini Park, whose coloured glass walls change from transparent to opaque at the flick of a switch. In Japanese culture, Wenders says in his Cannes press notes, public toilets are not the unsightly, unsanitary places of Western imagination but “small sanctuaries of peace and dignity.”
Wenders first shot a film in Japan almost 40 years ago, Tokyo-Ga (1985), a documentary homage to Yasujiro Ozu. Perfect Days is also full of Ozu homages: Hirayama shares his name and some lifestyle parallels with the hero of the Japanese maestro’s elegiac final film, Autumn Afternoon (1962). These are big shoes to fill but Wenders works these allusive elements with a light touch.
While Perfect Days has no formal music score, it makes heavy use of the diegetic soundtrack from Hirayama’s vintage audio cassette collection, mostly played on his drives to and from work. Lou Reed, a longtime Wenders favourite and sometime collaborator, gives this film its title with his classic rueful ballad Perfect Day. Hirayama also loves Patti Smith, The Kinks, Van Morrison, Otis Redding, The Animals and more, with House of the Rising Sun appearing in both English and Japanese language versions. It is pretty obvious the director is projecting his own music taste onto his protagonist here – indeed, Wenders himself makes a fleeting Hitchcockian cameo in a Shibuya record store that specialises in vintage vinyl and cassettes.
This sentimental salute to the analogue rock era from a senior director who came of age in the Sixties stays just the right side of self-indulgent, though the subplot in which punky young beauty Aya (Aoi Yamada) becomes fascinated by Patti Smith feels like a Baby Boomer fantasy too far. In your dreams, granddad. In general, the film’s younger characters are the least convincing, with Takashi in particular little more than a clumsy comic caricature. Wenders is on much firmer ground depicting his own generation.
Gentle and lyrical, Perfect Days offers a Zen-like affirmation of humility, modesty, empathy and the spiritual rewards of a simple life. It is also a love letter to the urban spaces and modernist structures of Tokyo, from its high-tech bathrooms to the record-breaking Sky Tree tower, which serves as a recurring visual motif. Another pleasing design element is the use of abstract monochrome montages to accompany Hirayama’s sleeping scenes. Credited to the director’s wife, photographer and visual artist Donata Wenders, these sublime interludes could have been longer, pushing the film into more experimental territory.
But minor complaints aside, Perfect Days is an unexpected late-career gem from Wenders, a small film with a big message: when life weighs too heavy on your shoulders, take a little time out to stop and smell the toilets.
Director: Wim Wenders
Screenwriters: Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasaki
Cast: Koji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano, Aoi Yamada, Yumi Aso, Sayuri Ishikawa, Tomokazu Miura, Min Tanaka
Cinematography: Franz Lustig
Editing: Toni Froschhammer
Dream installations: Donata Wenders
Production designer: Towako Kuwajima
Producers: Koji Yanai, Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasaki
Production companies: Master Mind Ltd (Japan), Spoon Inc. (Japan), Wenders Images GBR (Germany)
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (competition)
In Japanese
123 minutes
