Perfect Days — finding enough in a day

Spoiler-free review.

Not much needs to happen in Perfect Days for a scene to work. A cassette goes into the player, sunlight falls through some leaves, someone stops for lunch. Written down, that sounds almost too slight. Watching it, the small differences start to matter.

Wim Wenders follows Hirayama, a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo, with real patience. The routine gives the film its shape, but it never makes him feel like a collection of charming habits. There is a private life behind that calm face, and Koji Yakusho lets us sense it without spelling everything out.

The direction is what I like most here. Wenders knows when to leave a shot alone. He gives an ordinary task enough time to become interesting, and lets a change in expression do work that a speech would only flatten. The music fits that approach too: these are songs someone lives with, rather than songs chosen to tell us what to feel.

It does ask you to settle into its pace. If you keep waiting for a larger plot to take over, a few stretches may feel repetitive. For me, the repetition is mostly what makes the interruptions count.

9/10. A film that made the ordinary feel valuable without pretending life is simple. Yakusho gives it a warmth that never turns sugary.

Directed by Wim Wenders · 2023 · Japanese. Film details: NEON. Poster artwork © its respective rights holders.

— Desly