Perfect Days
2023 · Wim Wenders
Hirayama is content with his life as a toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine, he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Through unexpected encounters, he reflects on finding beauty in the world.
dir. Wim Wenders · 2023
Wim Wenders, the New German Cinema wanderer whose Tokyo-Ga once went searching for the ghost of Ozu, finally made his own Tokyo film — and it turned out to be his finest fiction in decades. Hirayama cleans the city's designer public toilets (the film grew from a commission around the real Tokyo Toilet project), and his days unfold in ritual repetition: the folded mattress, the vending-machine coffee, the analogue camera aimed at sunlight through leaves. Shot in seventeen days in the boxy 4:3 frame, the film builds its drama entirely from variation within routine, trusting that repetition, closely watched, becomes revelation. Koji Yakusho, a titan of Japanese cinema since the Imamura years, won Best Actor at Cannes for a performance conducted largely in silence; his cassette deck supplies the voice — Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Nina Simone — a jukebox autobiography of Wenders's own generation. The Japanese have a word for the flicker of light through foliage, komorebi, and the film ends on the thing itself: a face in morning traffic, holding joy and sorrow in the same long take.
Lines of influence
- Tokyo Story (1953) — Perfect Days quotes Ozu's tatami-level static camera and 'pillow shots' — cutaways to empty rooms, treetops and objects that carry emotion between scenes, restaged as Hirayama's lingering inserts of komorebi and toilets.
- Late Spring (1949) — Ozu builds mono-no-aware from repeated domestic rituals and transferred-emotion gestures; Hirayama's identical wake–fold-futon–water-plants morning is the same accumulation of everyday habit into feeling.
- An Autumn Afternoon (1962) — Ozu's final film renders an aging solitary man's melancholy through routine and near-frontal, restrained performance — the affective register Wenders hands to Yakusho.
- Tokyo-Ga (1985) — Wenders' own documentary pilgrimage retracing Ozu's Tokyo and interviewing Ryū and Atsuta; Perfect Days is the fiction-film culmination of that decades-long study of Ozu's grammar.
- Paris, Texas (1984) — With Robby Müller, Wenders builds a near-silent protagonist whose interior life is read through gesture and landscape rather than speech — the wordless-acting template reused for Hirayama.
- Wings of Desire (1987) — Wenders' observational, angel's-eye drift that dignifies small anonymous urban lives; the same compassionate, eavesdropping attention to strangers organizes Hirayama's city.
- Alice in the Cities (1974) — Wenders' formative New German Cinema road film of patient observation and grainy 16mm texture — the slice-of-life, drift-and-watch grammar he later refines into ritual.
- Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) — Akerman films repeated domestic chores in near-real time so meaning accrues through tiny day-to-day variations — the repetition-as-revelation structure Wenders borrows for Hirayama's cycling days.
- Five Dedicated to Ozu (2003) — Five long static takes of nature explicitly dedicated to Ozu, treating durational contemplation of light and water as narrative — kin to Perfect Days' long-take komorebi dreams.
- Café Lumière (2003) — An Ozu-centennial commission that renders Tokyo through train lines and elliptical everyday routine; the same reverent, contemporary transposition of Ozu into modern Tokyo.
- The Tree of Life (2011) — Malick's handheld, sun-through-leaves cinematography and whispered interior monologue codify the dappled-light (komorebi) contemplative mode Franz Lustig's camera echoes.
- The Eel (1997) — Kōji Yakusho as a quiet man rebuilding a life through modest routine — the minimalist, interiorized everyman performance Wenders casts him to reprise.
- Paterson (2016) — A week of a bus driver-poet's identical-yet-varied daily rounds finding grace in repetition; the closest living sibling in structuring a film as gentle routine punctuated by small epiphanies.
- The Straight Story (1999) — Lynch's patient, unironic portrait of an old man's simple journey — slice-of-life tenderness and durational calm centered on an elderly protagonist's small resolve.
- Still Walking (2008) — Kore-eda as Ozu's contemporary heir, carrying emotion through domestic everydayness, food and ritual rather than plot — the same restrained naturalism of habit.
- Columbus (2017) — Kogonada, an Ozu video-essayist, applies Ozu's geometric static framing and architecture-as-feeling; a direct formal descendant of the same contemplative compositional lineage.
- Drive My Car (2021) — A contemporary Japanese contemplative drama built around a diegetic cassette tape of a dead voice — the analogue-cassette-as-emotional-object device that Perfect Days makes central to Hirayama's commute.