PERFECT DAYS - Mark Reviews Movies

Perfect Days, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 6, 2024

Life so easily becomes a series of routines. It has for the main character of Perfect Days. He's a cleaner of public restrooms in Tokyo, who must keep to a strict schedule for his job. Every morning, he awakens, not to the sound of an alarm clock or his cellphone, but to the gentle sweeping of leaves on the road outside his apartment.

His routine depends on the routine of an older woman whom he almost certainly has never met, whose name he likely doesn't know, and whom he maybe has only seen in passing if his gaze looks out the window before he begins the routine of getting ready for the rest of his routine. We depend on people, oftentimes without even being fully cognizant of just how true that fact is.

Such are the thoughts that come while watching Hirayama (Kôji Yakusho), a man who is an invisible stranger to so many, as he goes about a string of busy days and, hopefully for him, quiet nights, as well as the occasional day off from work. There's a lot of time to think about such matters in co-writer/director Wim Wenders' film, because it is made up of the same events over and over again. Hirayama awakens to the sweeping, shaves with an electric razor, brushes his teeth, buys a can of coffee from a vending machine outside his home, gets into the company van, and sets out to clean the same restrooms he cleaned the day before and the day before that.

This may not seem like the kind of story that encourages thought or presents much insight, and that is what's so sneakily, subtly profound about the best moments of this film. Wenders and co-screenwriter Takuma Takasaki firmly establish the pattern of Hirayama's life so that we can witness the little and more significant ways in which the routine is broken. If life does become the same things repeated, isn't the joy, the pain, and maybe the meaning of it to be found in the moments that aren't the same-old same old?

Here, Hirayama gifts himself such moments, whether he knows it or not. Any time he isn't cleaning, the man puts on music—always on cassette from his vast collection—in his van. On his lunch break, he sits on the same bench in the same park, eats the same kind of sandwich, looks up at the same tree, and takes a photo, with a real camera and on actual film, from the same angle.

After his shift is finished, Hirayama cleans himself at a bathhouse and goes to the same little restaurant in a market, where the owner knows him, thanks him for his hard work, and makes sure he has something to drink as quickly as possible. On his time off, he makes sure to take a trip to a favorite bookstore, where the clerk knows him and is excited to offer some tantalizing hint of promise for his most recent selection of reading material, and before falling asleep each night, Hirayama reads until it's time to sleep or he's too tired to keep going.

Is this enough? It certainly seems to be for this man, whose face lights up whenever a song starts playing through the speakers of his van (For the really upbeat numbers, he'll even sway side-to-side a bit) and tightens in full concentration as he parses his nighttime text. Many would say Hirayama is a man of few words—if that, even—and simple pleasures. He might even agree with that assessment, and if there's even a tinge of criticism or judgment in the statement, Hirayama would probably brush it aside. This is a person who knows who he is, what he likes, what he wants, and simply does it, regardless of what others might think.

There's something lovely in that, and Yakusho's mostly wordless performance communicates every little thought—from the minor amusement of people-watching, to the utter contentment of listening to Otis Redding sing about a dock in his van or to Lou Reed's pseudo-title tune while he lies on the floor, to the darker thoughts that come as this man's past emerges—with keen precision. His work here goes beyond the vital notion of reacting and into the realm of simply being this character. Wenders trusts and knows his star well enough to keep the camera on Yakusho as much as possible, often in tight close-up so that every little movement of his face can speak more than a page of monologue.

The actual story is a bit more than repetition, though. There's Hirayama's tenuous relationship with his younger, less structured co-worker Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who shows up when he pleases and is more concerned with getting a date with a young woman he likes than the actual job. She's Aya (Aoi Yamada), who doesn't really matter to Hirayama's life or story, except that she shatters whatever prejudgment Hirayama might have had about her through a simple act of listening. Takashi has a similar moment, when Hirayama witnesses him being friendly to someone for no particular reason.

A little more happens, most notably the unexpected arrival of Hirayama's niece Niko (Arisa Nakano), whom he barely recognizes now, and how the sudden return of a family member makes him confront how he ended up cleaning toilets in the first place and a late scene with a stranger that adds an existential layer to the film's bittersweet thesis. Is it enough? For Perfect Days, it is, and for Hirayama and the rest of us, it has to be, because it's all we have.

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