Something to watch tonight: Saturday 20 July

Perfect Days (Wenders, 2023)

This beau­ti­ful thing* arrived in my let­ter­box yes­ter­day so I thought I would revis­it my review from the ori­gin­al cinema release, back in January of this year:

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.

Refer a friend

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’ve made that piece from the archive free to all sub­scribers because you might also like to read my thoughts on the music­al The Color Purple and the not-musical The Iron Claw which came out in the same week.

*New Zealand’s giant clas­si­fic­a­tion stick­ers are awful aren’t they? Another argu­ment for us to just fed­er­ate with Australia and be done with it.

Where to watch Perfect Days

Aotearoa and Australia: Digital rent­al or phys­ic­al media from Madman Entertainment

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Mubi

USA: Streaming on Hulu