We have Covid to thank for Perfect Days, the best film from Wim Wenders in some time. The original idea was to get Wenders to Tokyo to make a documentary about the toilets built for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (a gig is a gig). But the Olympics first got postponed to 2021 and then eventually took place behind closed doors without any spectators. The toilets barely got used. Wenders, however, did get to make his film.
But instead of a documentary, Wenders pushed to make a feature film, incorporating those 17 toilets designed by leading architects, with the action focused not on the toilets themselves – though they do feature prominently – but on the man who cleans them.
Back in 1985 Wenders made a documentary, Tokyo-Ga, a homage to one of his idols, the director Yasujirō Ozu, who rejected much of the blah about the language of films and went about things his own way. Shooting low, hardly ever moving the camera, rarely switching away from a 50mm lens and using repetition to make a point about human existence, realism and real drama, Ozu built up a body of work now considered to be among the best films ever made (he has three entries in the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest Films poll).
Wenders does not go as low and slow as Ozu, but he’s borrowed his use of repetition – and Ozu’s direct, trickery-free style – to build up a story of almost Zen-like calm. It follows a man called Hirayama (a name also borrowed from Ozu), who wakes each day in a tiny apartment, grabs an iced coffee from the vending machine outside his home, then gets in his van and drives to work, listening each day to one of a small selection of old cassette tapes – Lou Reed, Patti Smith, The Animals (Wenders is a rock dude).
At work Hirayama cleans toilets, diligently, thoroughly, using a little mirror on an arm to see under the toilet rim. At lunchtime he eats a sandwich in a little park shaded with trees. At the end of the day a visit to little cafe, a wash at a bath house. Throughout, Hirayama, smiling beatifically like the Dalai Lama, barely speaks, even to his co-worker, Takashi, the alter ego – loud, young, talkative, connected up to the everyday 21st-century world.
And repeat. And repeat. Wenders lets us know that this is how Hirayama has lived for a long time in a relaxed montage of his unvarying days – up at dawn, snip the stray moustache hairs, in the van with the cassettes, then on his knees for a day of scrubbing and polishing etc etc.

Moments of variance come like a sledgehammer. Hirayama finds a little sapling under a tree and takes it home to pot it up. His niece (Arisa Nakano), who’s run away from home, suddenly arrives, and though he barely recognises her, we understand he’s her favourite uncle. Later, his sister (Yumi Asō) arrives to reclaim her daughter and in a tiny snatch of conversation between him and her we get a sudden insight into Hirayama’s past.
After all the repetition it’s like a punch in the guts. It’s a technique from Ozu, as is the use of “pillow shots” – sudden, tiny poetic montages indicating a chapter ending – and the occasional moment when Hirayama stares right into the camera. Or is it the actor playing him, the disarmingly charming Kōji Yakusho? It’s not entirely clear.
Hirayama is an old-school analogue kind of guy. He seems to have no phone, reads books, takes photos on a film camera. If it’s nothing else Perfect Days is an antidote to the always-on Insta-world.
I’ve been deliberately vague about what happens in Perfect Days, because only two or three things do really happen. But it’s powerful nonetheless, an exhortation to live life like it’s worth it, to stop and smell the roses.
Perfect Days – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024