SHREWSBURY FILM SOCIETY
| Director | Wim Wenders |
|---|---|
| Country | Germany |
| Year | 2023 |
Perfect Days, written and directed by Wim Wenders and co-written with Takuma Takasaki, is a Japanese-German contemplative drama that premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. The film competed for the Palme d’Or and earned Wenders both the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury and the Best Actor Award for Koji Yakusho’s deeply subtle performance. Notably, it was selected as Japan’s Academy Awards submission, becoming the first film directed by a non-Japanese filmmaker to do so. Additionally, Perfect Days won the Best Film award at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards in late 2023. Shot in just sixteen days, the film emerged from an invitation by Tokyo’s Tokyo Toilet art project—a documentary commission that grew organically into a richly meditative feature.
Hirayama, portrayed by Koji Yakusho, is a quiet middle-aged custodian of public toilets in Shibuya, Tokyo. His days unfold in deliberate, ritualistic order: dawn grooming, folding his bedroll, tending to houseplants, and embarking on his rounds accompanied by the warm nostalgia of cassette-tape rock (Lou Reed, Nina Simone, the Kinks). His free moments—photographing trees, cultivating seedlings, and reading Faulkner by night—exude humble joy. This carefully choreographed life is gently unsettled as his niece and estranged sister reappear, hinting at an emotional past left unexamined. The film, though sparse in narrative, is deeply textured in the interplay of presence, memory, and the beauty found in everyday service.
Koji Yakusho’s performance is a masterclass in understatement. His Hirayama conveys serenity, unspoken depth, and unpretentious purpose through minute gestures and soulful eyes—and rightly earned him Best Actor at Cannes. Co-star Tokio Emoto adds a foil with his boisterous colleague, disrupting Hirayama’s routine and providing subtle human contrast. The cameo visits from his niece and sister introduce emotional resonance and narrative hints that enrich our perception of Hirayama's solitude without demanding exposition.
At its heart, Perfect Days is a meditation on mindfulness, contentment, and the spiritual implications of routine. It subtly shifts the notion of heroism—from grand adventures to the quiet dignity of humble service. Critics note Wenders’ embrace of a gentle existentialism, drawing a lineage from Ozu’s minimalism and his own earlier films of withdrawn loners like Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire. The Japanese idea of komorebi—sunlight filtering through leaves—perfectly encapsulates the film’s fleeting preciousness of ordinary beauty.
With cinematography by Franz Lustig, the film employs framed austerity—often using the Academy ratio—to anchor Hirayama within his city’s architecture and emotional landscape. Wenders’ approach is low-key, observant, and lovingly ritualised, treating toilets—which are part of the real-life Tokyo Toilet Project—as public art and civic touchstones. Moments such as Hirayama selecting tapes, photographing trees, or cleaning meticulously become motifs of visual poetry. The soundtrack, dominated by 60s-80s Americana, colors each scene with nostalgic warmth and thematic resonance, notably when “Feeling Good” underscores a moment rich with both serenity and subtle melancholy.
Perfect Days has revitalised interest in Japanese urban design, including the Tokyo Toilet installations themselves. It’s lauded globally, earning Oscar consideration for Best International Feature and claimed by many as Wenders’ return to form—“a manifesto as much as a movie”. For UK cinephiles accustomed to kinetic narratives, the film offers a rare invitation to slow down, to taste each frame, each routine, each breath.
Perfect Days is cinema as mindfulness. Under Wenders’ gentle, intuitive gaze, Hirayama becomes a secular saint of the everyday. The film asks us not for spectacle, but stillness: to see the sacred in the mundane, to honour ritual, and to live—and watch—with presence. Much like a photograph of light through leaves, it lingers.
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