Perfect Days · reception & legacy

2023 · Wim Wenders

How Perfect Days has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Premiered at Cannes 2023 to warm reviews and a Best Actor prize for Koji Yakusho, it was instantly hailed as Wenders's best fiction film in decades after a long run of shrugged-at features. It has since settled in not as a comeback curiosity but as a genuine late-career peak — the Wenders film people now recommend first.

What's debated

The recurring fight: is it a profound portrait of a dignified small life, or a wealthy European director aestheticizing a Tokyo toilet cleaner's poverty — an argument sharpened by the film's origins in a sponsored project promoting Shibuya's designer public toilets.

Its footprint

The closing minutes — Yakusho's face cycling through joy and grief as Nina Simone's 'Feeling Good' plays — became the film's endlessly screenshotted, much-tweeted image, and its cassette-tape playlist (Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Van Morrison) sent the analog-nostalgia crowd into raptures. It also pushed the Japanese word 'komorebi' (sunlight filtering through leaves) into everyday film-fan vocabulary and turned Tokyo's architect-designed toilets into an actual tourist itinerary.

Where it stands

A near-instant Letterboxd darling and comfort-cinema touchstone — the rare 2020s arthouse release that cinephiles press on non-cinephiles, and the standard answer to 'where do I start with late Wenders'.

★ Did you know? It began as a commission to shoot short promotional documentaries about Shibuya's designer public toilets; Wenders counter-proposed a fiction feature instead, shot it in about 17 days — and it went on to become Japan's Oscar entry, the first time Japan was represented by a non-Japanese director.

Named by the director

Influences Wim Wenders has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

Yasujirō Ozu — Wenders, a lifelong Ozu devotee (he made the documentary Tokyo-Ga about him), repeatedly cited Ozu as the film's guiding spirit, naming his hero 'Hirayama' after the recurring family name in Ozu's films.