Perfect Days: Wim Wenders Deals Full Flush with Simple Toilet Cleaner Tale

By Chris Knight

Rating: A

Not trying to sound like your friendly neighbourhood algorithm here, but if you enjoyed Paterson, Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 drama about… well, not much of anything to be honest, then you may similarly be moved by its spiritual cousin, Perfect Days by Wim Wenders.

Disarmingly simple, it’s the story of Hirayama (Koji Yakusho), a Tokyo toilet cleaner in the city’s busy Shibuya district whose modest, almost monastic existence reminded me of a line by Victor Hugo: “He spent his life in always doing the same things at the same moment. A month of his year resembled an hour of his day.”

Hirayama rises early, trims his moustache, spritzes his collection of tiny plants, buys a can of coffee from the vending machine outside his plain home, gets in his van, and begins his janitorial rounds.

Not sure if the lavatories he visits are so pristine because of Japanese cultural practices or just movie magic, but if there’s anything that took this North American out of the tale, it was how already clean are the places Hirayama is cleaning.

Then again, the story behind the picture is that Wenders was invited to Japan to witness the so-called Tokyo Toilet Project, a collaboration between civic planners and famous designers to see what could be done to elevate the humble public commode. It was hoped that some photographs or even a short film might emerge from the visit.

Instead, Wenders created a feature that is Japan’s Oscar nominated best international film this year. It also won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes film festival, not to mention a best-actor award for Yakusho, who says little but does so much with his face, eyes, and mouth.

What makes Hirayama smile? Many things. Trees, certainly, which he sometimes photographs with an old-fashioned film camera during his lunch break in the park, using an odd technique of not looking through the viewfinder, but just lining up the camera and letting it see what it will. He’s also enamoured with Skytree, a broadcast and observation tower almost twice the height of the Tokyo Tower, and currently the tallest freestanding structure in the G20 nations. (Sorry CN Tower!)

But he also takes joy from such simple pleasures as a baseball game on TV at the restaurant where he often dines, or watching a homeless man’s sinewy dance near one of the restrooms he cleans every day. (The man playing this minor character is none other than famed dancer-turned-actor Min Tanaka.)

If there is one thing that really annoys him — though it’s a bit of welcome comic relief for viewers — it’s his junior colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto), a chatterbox layabout with a habit of defining every life experience on a scale of one to 10.

I haven’t even got to Hirayama’s two main interests, which are books and music. When we first meet him, he’s working his way through something by Faulkner, and on two occasions he visits a bookstore to pick up something new, one time choosing the mid-century Japanese writer Aya Koda, another picking up Patricia Highsmith, whom the bookseller confesses taught her “the difference between fear and anxiety.”

But the music is where Perfect Days really takes flight, with songs that include Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” (of course) as well as contemporaneous gems from Van Morrison, The Kinks, Patti Smith and more. Hirayama keeps a collection of vintage cassette tapes at home and in his van, and often lets those voices of 50-plus years ago provide the soundtrack to his drive.

The selection also includes “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” by Otis Redding, in this writer’s estimation about as perfect a song as has ever been crafted by humankind. That’s almost enough to make me give this film (as Takashi would say) a 10 out of 10.

But I’m going to dial back my praise ever so slightly. Call it a nine. Were I to be forced to rank them, Perfect Days might fall just a little behind Paterson. And I sometimes wished for a bit more information, backstory or history of the main character, whose family life is tantalizingly hinted at in the segment where his sister’s young daughter briefly crashes at his place.

Then again, that desire on the part of the viewer to know more is also the hallmark of a great character and an expertly crafted film, someone who feels like you could shake their hand and strike up a conversation, something that feels real enough to step inside, look around and explore. Perfect Days is both those things, and much more besides.

Perfect Days. Directed by Wim Wenders. Starring Koji Yakusho, and Tokio Emoto. In theatres February 7 at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox and Varsity Cinema; February 16 in Vancouver, and wider on February 23.