Friday new releases: 26 January 2024

Perfect Days, The Color Purple and The Iron Claw are in cinemas

Back in 2018 we had a fam­ily hol­i­day in Japan – Tokyo, Kyoto, Hiroshima and Osaka. I know two weeks is nev­er enough to know a place, but it was cer­tainly more than enough to fall in love with it. Well, that and all that Japanese cinema we watch.

Wim Wenders’ new film Perfect Days is set in Tokyo, and it was a start­lingly famil­i­ar Tokyo to the one we exper­i­enced, to the extent we got quite emotional.

Kôji Yakusho is Hirayama, a middle-aged man liv­ing in a mod­est flat in cent­ral Tokyo – there’s a view of the fam­ous Sky Tree tower when he steps out into the street. Every morn­ing before dawn he is woken by the sound of a neigh­bour sweep­ing up leaves. He cleans his teeth, puts on his over­alls, buys a can of cof­fee from the vend­ing machine and sets off for work in his little blue van.

He cleans pub­lic toi­lets for a liv­ing – all over Tokyo. Almost the first thing you notice is that these facil­it­ies are won­der­ful com­pared with what we are used to here. All dif­fer­ent, all archi­tec­tur­ally thought­ful and tech­no­lo­gic­ally advanced. Citizens should be proud of hav­ing such high stand­ards for con­veni­ence and Hirayama takes great pride in his work sup­port­ing them.

When we were in Japan, we saw how you could ima­gine that there are no ‘shit’ jobs. Even the guy who opens and closes the gate to the hotel car park wears white gloves. Every job con­trib­utes to the smooth run­ning of soci­ety which means that every­one bene­fits from that work.

Not every­one agrees, though. Hirayama has a young co-worker (Tokio Emoto) whose work eth­ic is not as pro­nounced but, des­pite his unre­li­ab­il­ity, even he has some sur­prises to offer.

As we get to know Hirayama’s silent routines – lunch in the park with con­veni­ence store sand­wiches and his trusty ana­logue cam­era, bathing at the loc­al onsen, din­ner every night at the same res­taur­ant in a sub­way sta­tion next to a dis­count DVD store, fall­ing asleep read­ing last thing at night – we get the pic­ture of someone who seems like a simple man who has worked a few things out about him­self and is happy as a result.

But, much like the greatest film ever made (accord­ing to Sight & Sound’s crit­ics’ poll), each repe­ti­tion reveals subtle dif­fer­ences and the arrival of new people mixes things up. Welcome or unwel­come, change is inev­it­able all the same.

Gentle, pro­found, del­ic­ately obser­v­ant, Perfect Days might be my idea of a per­fect film. Joining all the strong films made last year by dir­ect­ors in their 80s, Perfect Days is made by a rel­at­ive baby. Wenders is only 78 but he has made some­thing that I think only an older per­son could have made.

Pay atten­tion to small things. Next time is next time – Now is now.

I was very enter­tained by the new music­al ver­sion of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. As it should have been, con­sid­er­ing the amount of effort that every­one involved put in to doing just that.

It’s a high energy, col­our­ful, grand cre­ation, so dif­fer­ent to Spielberg’s muted 1985 adapt­a­tion. I love that film – and what a lovely sur­prise to have a Whoopi Goldberg cameo – but this new ver­sion takes a dif­fer­ent tack.

A music­al encour­ages you to think of a story a dif­fer­ent way, and The Color Purple now stands as a genu­ine American epic – a story that in the 40 years since it was pub­lished has estab­lished itself as a kind myth­o­logy for Black read­ers. The emo­tions are big, the res­on­ances are big, why shouldn’t it be played big?

I only wish that all the songs were as strong as the one genu­ine showstop­per – “Hell No!”

Like too many mod­ern music­als, the songs just tell you what you already know rather than mov­ing things along, but the orches­tra­tions and spir­ited per­form­ances – and excel­lent cho­reo­graphy – carry the day.

I was sur­prised to find myself as unmoved as I was by The Iron Claw, con­sid­er­ing the shock­ing tragedy of the story and the undoubted craft dis­played by the film­makers, to the extent that I have had to inter­rog­ate my lack of response to it.

I’m clearly not a heart­less per­son. I cry at the drop of a hat, frankly, but there’s some­thing miss­ing from The Iron Claw that is neces­sary to break through my usu­ally flimsy defences.

I think, a little bit like pro­fes­sion­al wrest­ling, the art form the Von Erich fam­ily from the film are engaged with, the film is a bit disin­genu­ous. The bones of the story are intact – tra­gic death upon tra­gic death – but I nev­er got the sense that I was see­ing the whole story.

The Von Erich were Texas wrest­ling roy­alty in the 70s and 80s. Fritz, the pat­ri­arch (Holt McCallany), had played the heel for years and nev­er got the suc­cess and respect the felt he deserved.

His four* kids join the fam­ily busi­ness but under pres­sure from Fritz – and unsup­por­ted by moth­er Dottie (Maura Tierney) – they crumble, each in their own way.

But, because dir­ect­or Sean Durkin’s script focuses on sur­viv­ing broth­er Kevin (excel­lent Zac Efron), the oth­ers (played by Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson and Stanley Simons) don’t get much depth to them. And then they die.

And the film elides the causes of their demises – or alludes to them without being spe­cif­ic. Is it being too respect­ful, too dis­tant? What was the rela­tion­ship to drugs – ster­oids and stim­u­lants? We see the phys­ic­al toll that wrest­ling places on them and some evid­ence of syr­inges in the dress­ing room, but how much of a role did that play in the men­tal health of these boys?

And the film makes clear that the bouts them­selves – and the belts rep­res­ent­ing the cham­pi­on­ships – are pre­de­ter­mined by the pro­moters and the broad­casters, but still tries to tell us to be sur­prised by the outcomes.

*Incredibly, there is yet anoth­er Von Erich broth­er who took his own life, Chris who shot him­self in 1991. Durkin has said that the film couldn’t bear anoth­er Von Erich death but I feel like we should be the judge of that, shouldn’t we?

Further reading

Wellington Film Society announced their pro­gramme for 2024 earli­er today and I picked five high­lights for RNZ.