Finding beauty in the routine
Mona
What would a perfect day mean for you? Would it still be perfect if everything stays the same…the second day…and third…and the seventh? This 124-minute drama starkly reminds one of Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot. If nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes in Godot; in Perfect Days, it’s the same routine, day after day.
Perfect Days
Director: Wim Wenders
Cast: Koji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano, Aoi Yamada, Yumi Aso, Sayuri Ishikawa, Tomokazu Miura, Min Tanaka
Rating: ***
The film follows the life of a janitor, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho). His day is set just like a clock works. Waking at dawn to the sound of sweeping on the road, morning ablutions, spraying water on his prized saplings, taking a drink from the vending machine; work, followed by lunch under his tree ‘friend’. Dinner at the same place and back to sleep! Weekend is laundry day and time for the pub. Pretty nondescript, but this toilet cleaner in Tokyo honours his work as meditation. And this man reads Faulkner, listens to Rolling Stones. And he photographs komorebi — shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind; and it only exists once, at that moment.
Perfect Days is a Japanese-German collaboration. Written and directed by Wim Wenders, it bears his signature style. There is a play-like quality to this screen outing. The drama is set in Tokyo and has Koji Yakusho as the lead star. Yakusho comes with a theatre background and wide international experience.
The film that opens with Tokyo’s skyline soon sifts through foliage and to our hero, Hirayama’s life. While for a non-theatre person seeing the repeat routine might be a forced one, fuelling the desire to change channels within the first 20 minutes, but yours truly bravely sits through it!
The repetition is peppered only with a new song playing on Hiramaya’s car sound system each day! We hear The House of Rising Sun, Pale Blue Eyes, Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay, Walking Through The Sleepy Day, Brown Eyed Girl and Perfect Day.
Yakusho gives a spectacular performance. Dressed in blue overalls, driving a blue van, a great worker but not a great a speaker, he says more with his expressions than words, which barely come to him. His body language, his character’s reverence for anyone and everyone — right from a drunk man to a lost child to a homeless person — all become one. In the last scene as he drives, he relives the myriad emotions, smiling through tears - the act sure is extraordinary! Other characters, though minor, add to his story — spunky niece Niko (Arisa Nakano), fun Mama (Sayuri Ishikawa) and bar girl Aya (Aoi Yamada). His assistant Takashi (Tokio Emoto) is an amusing presence too.
The Japanese film, dubbed in English, is about the beauty of routine and in following it. To witness all that there is — Japan’s tallest building Skytree and the magnificent tree in the park. And to be open to embrace all that comes along — a runaway niece, fellow worker’s shenanigans, to play shadow tag with a dying man, one last time!
Why would an intellectual leave his wealthy family and clean toilets, why wouldn’t everything stay the same or why love is not easy when you are broke… well, some questions are forever going to remain unanswered!
(Streaming on MUBI)
