Wim Wenders (2023)
The Academy Awards handout a few days ago mostly rewarded three hours of prolix self-importance and – worse – over two hours of noisome grandstanding: Oppenheimer (seven wins) and Poor Things (four) dominated proceedings. So despite my reservations about The Zone of Interest, its two Oscars (along with Anatomy of a Fall‘s richly-deserved Best Original Screenplay win) supplied some welcome relief. Jonathan Glazer’s genuinely thought-provoking film won Best Sound and Best International Feature. In the latter category it had at least one worthy rival among the other nominees ((I’ve not yet seen the remaining three[1]): Perfect Days, his first dramatic feature in six years, is an unusually likeable picture from Wim Wenders.
The Zone of Interest, written and directed by an Englishman and the UK representative in the International Feature category, is set in Germany. Perfect Days, made by a German, represented Japan, where the story takes place. The main character is sixty-something Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) and the film begins with attentive description of the start of his day. Hirayama wakes, rolls up and puts away his bedding, brushes his teeth, washes his face and pulls on overalls. He then waters house plants, steps outside, looks up and smiles gently before getting a drink from a vending machine in the courtyard of his apartment building. He starts up his van and heads for central Tokyo, playing a cassette tape on the way. Arrived at his destination, Hirayama takes equipment from the van and gets to work with it, cleaning public toilets.
Over the next forty minutes or so, Wim Wenders describes Hirayama’s routines repeatedly, particularly the early morning routine. While making clear this is pretty unvarying, Wenders doesn’t present it in exactly the same way each time. He uses different camera angles and, as the viewer gets used to the routine, abbreviates it somewhat. The repetition helps us notice things: Hirayama doesn’t need an alarm clock to wake up at the right time; his smile to greet the morning as he steps outside is sometimes followed by a little yawn. This treatment of quotidian procedure is very different from the real-time, minutely detailed observation of the title character in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Wenders’s start-of-day emphasis recalls more Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz (1979) but that connection emphasises the gulf between the two films’ protagonists. Fosse’s alter ego, Joe Gideon – juggling high-pressure creative projects and the women in his life, subsisting on pills, alcohol, cigarettes and Alka-Seltzer – is famous, driven and dissatisfied. Hirayama is apparently content with his circumscribed existence and takes pride in his menial job, for which he uses his own, presumably top-of-the-range cleaning equipment.
His food intake exceeds Joe Gideon’s but Hirayama is still a modest eater. Sitting on a park bench at lunchtime, he has a sandwich. After work, he often cycles to a public bathhouse then on to a noodle restaurant for a meal and a drink. He regularly takes photographs, with a camera rather than on a phone – particularly of trees in the park that he frequents. At the weekend, he goes to a photographic shop to collect his latest photos and hand in the next film for developing; he also visits a laundrette and a second-hand book shop. His brief conversations with the shop’s owner, the man who develops his photos, the restaurant proprietor and a waiter there, are just about the extent of Hirayama’s social life. He has a junior co-worker, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who’s decidedly chattier than his senior partner. As Takashi says to his girlfriend, Aya (Aoi Yamada), Hirayama is ‘a great worker but not much of a talker’. It must be a quarter of an hour into the film before he speaks at all – and then in laconic response to Takashi, who’s arrived late for work and explains why, at length. Self-preoccupied Takashi demonstrates the virtues of reticence. With him, everyone and everything is marked out of ten. He tells Aya that Hirayama is ‘nine on a scale of weird’. His own chances of making it with Aya, he admits to Hirayama, score lower.
Hirayama and Takashi work for ‘The Tokyo Toilet’: the words are emblazoned, in English, on the back of their overalls. According to Wikipedia, Wim Wenders was invited to Tokyo in 2021
‘to observe the Tokyo Toilet Project, a project in which Japanese public toilets were redesigned in 17 locations throughout Shibuya with the help of 16 creators invited from around the world. Wenders was invited to take a look at the uniqueness of each of these facilities. At first, the producers envisioned Wenders would make a short film or series of short films on the facilities, but he opted for a feature film …’
It comes as no surprise to learn that the public conveniences on display in Perfect Days are special. Although Takashi complains how ‘gross’ his work can be – and even allowing that Hirayama goes about his meticulously – the toilets look, to British eyes, pristine, as well as hi-tech as far as door opening and locking mechanisms are concerned. (Similarly striking that the drinks vending machine outside Hirayama’s home is never out of order.)
Wenders’s sustained scrutiny of his main character’s small world makes Perfect Days peculiarly fascinating. Because Hirayama continues to do the same things, we watch him doing them closely – for fear of missing something (Perfect Days does have this in common with Jeanne Dielman). The film’s approach makes us more aware, too, of our expectations of screen narrative and protagonists, and the prejudicial assumptions underlying such expectations. If we’re reasonably honest, we’ll probably admit to asking ourselves, as we watch, if the prescribed schedules of a toilet cleaner – even one as conscientious and engaging as Hirayama – are worth two hours of our time. This viewer anyway started to wonder what had reduced him to this job, whether he wasn’t really lonely and concealing grief or misery.
Certain elements encourage curiosity about whether there’s more to Hirayama than meets the eye: his choice of music, from the 1960s or 1970s, to play on the way to work (more on that below); his book purchases (William Faulkner, Aya Koda, Patricia Highsmith); his scrupulously impenetrable dreams (there are a few too many of these flickering monochrome interludes). Wenders and Takuma Takasaki, who shares the screenplay credit, tempt us increasingly into thinking more conventional drama is in the offing. Hirayama sees a piece of paper half-inserted in a crevice in a washroom wall. He takes it out to examine, writes something on it, puts it back; it’s still there next day and he follows the same procedure. This has a Lunchbox (2013) vibe but it turns out Hirayama is just participating in a game of noughts and crosses: the person who starts it isn’t identified. On the park bench next to his at lunchtime sits an unsmiling young woman. Hirayama always looks ready to talk to her. She opens her mouth to eat, never to speak. When Takashi suddenly quits his job, he’s replaced by a female cleaner but she hardly registers at all in what follows. About halfway through the film, though, something does change.
A girl in her late teens (Arisa Nakano) turns up at Hirayama’s home late one evening; he calls her Niko and remarks on how much she’s grown. She’s his niece, daughter of the sister from whom he’s estranged. So, at least for the moment, is Niko, who has fallen out with her mother and asks to stay at Hirayama’s. The first part of her intervention in the film is very effectively done. The audience has become so used to and absorbed by Hirayama’s routines that, although he himself is kindly hospitable to Niko, we feel almost put out that she is to some extent disturbing them. That feeling gradually dissipates as she asks to accompany her uncle to work the following day; the day after that, they take photographs and go on a bike ride together. In Niko’s company, Hirayama is more talkative. Then his sister, Keiko (Yumi Asō), arrives to take her daughter home. Keiko asks her brother if it’s true he’s a toilet cleaner, then if he’ll visit their father, who’s now in a nursing home and, adds Keiko, no longer capable of saying the hurtful things to his son that he used to say. Hirayama shakes his head but, as he says goodbye to Keiko, hugs her and weeps.
This last part of Niko’s visit is the least satisfying, for two reasons. First, it’s clumsy that Keiko is in a chauffeured car: we get that she’s well heeled without this how-the-other-half-lives underlining. Second, the sudden evidence of Hirayama’s unhappy family background is, in effect, a sop to audience disbelief that Wenders’s hero can simply be the peaceful, contented soul he appears to be. Despite the vast difference of their subject matter, Perfect Days and The Zone of Interest pose a similar challenge to their directors. Both have a clear central theme; both must decide on the balance between illustrating that theme repeatedly and injecting dramatic incident. It could be argued that Wim Wenders shows greater integrity to the prevailing style of his film in that no single definite story develops in Perfect Days. On the other hand, Jonathan Glazer finds, in the events that interrupt the settled domestic arrangements of the Höss family, a convincing means of animating his ‘ambient genocide’ thesis. Wenders eventually moves to crystallise his main theme, which seems to be: make the most of whatever your life is (the movie’s title is not ironic). He does so for a relatively much shorter time and on a smaller scale than Glazer but less successfully, too.
Opening the door of his usual restaurant, Hirayama sees the woman proprietor (Sayuri Ishikawa) embracing a man (Tomokazu Miura). Hirayama hurries out in embarrassment, buys cigarettes and three canned highballs. He makes his way to a public area beside a lake. He arrives there at dusk and is approached by the man he saw in the restaurant. Recognising Hirayama from his brief appearance there, the man, whose name is Tomoyama, asks for a cigarette. He then explains that the restaurant owner is his ex-wife; he hasn’t seen her in years but he now has terminal cancer and wants to make peace with her before he dies. Tomoyama asks Hirayama if shadows deepen as it gets darker. The two men then play a game of tag with their own shadows. This is a rare self-consciously arty scene in Perfect Days and its intrusion into Wenders’s gracefully realistic texture jars. Hirayama is certainly a creature of habit but it’s not clear how Tomoyama knows just where to find him, evidently some time after their momentary encounter in the restaurant. Tomoyama seems to be directed to the lakeside area by the metaphysical importance of what he’ll have to say there.
It’s a relief when normal service is resumed to conclude the film, as Hirayama starts another working day. It’s darker now when he goes outside but he still has that gentle good-to-be-alive smile for the open air and sky. He owns an impressive collection of music cassettes, which interest Takashi and Aya when he gives them a lift in the van. Aya is intrigued by such antique artefacts; Takashi, short of the funds he thinks he needs to impress her, is sure that Hirayama could make a killing selling some of the cassettes. Takashi is proved right when he drags Hirayama along to a dealer in vintage music but Hirayama refuses to sell. (He lends Takashi the cash the cassettes would have made but doesn’t get it back.) The songs played in Hirayama’s van in the course of Perfect Days include The Animals’ ‘The House of the Rising Sun’, Otis Redding’s ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’, The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’ and, of course, Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’. What’s in effect the theme song is also played as an instrumental during the closing credits but Wenders chooses Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’ for the finale inside the van. Kōji Yakusho delivers a fine, admirably restrained performance throughout. Wenders waits until this last sequence to give his lead actor his head. As ‘Feeling Good’ plays, the camera stays on Hirayama’s face. He smiles before his eyes fill with tears; Kōji Yakusho then alternates and blends the two things a second time. His moment of bravura acting is well worth waiting for.
14 March 2024
[1] Afternote: I’ve now also seen The Teachers’ Lounge.
