"Perfect Days"

  ☆☆☆☆☆ 

"I went to the woods to live deliberately," Thoreau wrote in Walden, "to front only the essential facts of life." In Wim Wenders' Perfect Days, a man named Hirayama doesn't go into the woods, but brings them closer to him, growing tiny saplings inside his cramped, rundown Tokyo apartment.

The attention he lavishes upon these tiny trees is matched by the attention he gives to his job: cleaning a set of architecturally wondrous toilets in Shibuya. Every day, Hirayama rises, gets himself ready, leaves his apartment with something close to a smile, and treats his job with an earnest respect. He says almost nothing, not even to his talkative, slightly daffy co-worker. This is not a man of few words: For most of Perfect Days, he's a man of no words.

Why? Has he made a decision as bold as Thoreau's? Is there a painful secret in his past? Hirayama has dreams, but they are fleeting images, just dances of light and shadow, echoes of the sunlight that shines through the trees. It's that light, that dazzling sparkle that is only of the moment, that forms something like the heart of Perfect Days. "Komorebi," a post-credit title card explains, is the Japanese word for this concept.

Wenders and co-screenwriter Takuma Takasaki take enormous care to show us a specific life in tremendous detail, yet as it unfolds there seems almost no plot to drive Perfect Days forward. And still, for two and a half hours Perfect Days is compulsively watchable, and never dull or boring. Perhaps that's because of the pride Hirayama takes in his work and his small, routine-filled life. Or it's because of Wenders' skill as a storyteller, beginning each day with a repetition that recalls the endless loop of Groundhog Day while adding new elements until the cycle repeats in ways that are familiar but that become wholly different.

There is nothing groundbreaking or bold about the filmmaking or the story that unfolds in Perfect Days, and yet as first one, then another, then a multitude of tiny variations and minor revelations (like a game of tic-tac-toe hidden by an unknown customer) elicit surprise, joy, frustration, disappointment, wonder. Hirayama tries to shield himself—through his silence, through his solitude—from life, but life insists on finding him, requires his participation.

Throughout, Wenders and the extraordinary actor Koji Yakusho pull us in to this one simple, specific life, and in the process reveal much more about the ways every one of us exists in the world, how we connect—or don't—with others, how we work in the smallest of ways to get through this day and on to the next. "Now is now," Hirayama observes in one of his rare conversations. It's all anyone is promised. All we can do is make it to the next day. That may, in the end, be all Perfect Days is trying to say. It doesn't sound like much, but in Wenders' hands, it's everything.

And in one stunning, mesmerizing, supremely moving final shot, Perfect Days sums up the hardships, the beauty, the hopes, the fears, the disappointments and the wonder of it all with wordless, exquisite precision. It is, in a word, perfect.

Viewed February 11, 2024 — AMC Century City 15

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