Perfect Days

Wim Wenders latest film is set in Tokyo, a place he is not unfamiliar with having set two documentaries and part of his 1991 opus Until the End of the World there.

Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) is a man of routine. Up with the birds he has his things laid out ready for the day. Driving the van to work he only listens to cassettes and then what could be called old time classics. This particular morning its House of the Rising Sun.

Hirayama cleans Tokyo’s toilets; going about his job with due diligence and pride. Both of which are lost on his colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto) who doesn’t do his work well, needs money and has a girlfriend he wants to spoil.

Takashi is one element of a story that is beautifully constructed using mostly just sound, images and colours. Hirayama barely speaks to anyone. He has his interests, photography – rolls of film - an enormous collection of books and music, which he enjoys to the full. Routing through second hand books shops and the like.

He appears to eat out most evening at a regular haunt. Back home he’s an assiduous reader before bed, then lights out and another day starts. He is content.

At work he’s dedicated taking people for what they are: he finds a lost boy and there’s no thanks from his mother. More playfully he’s in a game of noughts and crosses through a paper left every day hidden in one of the toilets each player taking their turn.

There’s not much that phases him until his niece Niko (Arisa Nekano) turns up out of the blue and the viewer gets to know a little more about Hirayama’s past and his relationship with this family.

Frankly not a lot happens. But it is a beautiful, totally absorbing film with Wenders allowing plenty of space for the characters to move around and develop. Though this isn’t a character study per se, Wenders provides enough to allow the viewer to take more of an interest in Hirayama on a deeper level, rather than the borderline eccentric that he could be taken for earlier on in the film.

The Tokyo that Wenders portrays is an unglamorous working and living city of millions. The academy ratio focusing the film in a way that the more usual wider format may have diluted.

The usual technological and neon power of Tokyo by night is dispensed with. This about the daylight hours; the vast urban sprawl of roads, alleys, commerce and suburbs have their own stories which Wenders touches on though these aren’t directly interlinking more just what happens during any given day and Hirayama is but one part of it.

It’s a film that will reward repeated viewings.

Perfect Days will be in Irish and UK cinemas on 23 February 2024.