'Perfect Days': Less a movie, more like moving in with a stranger - review

Perfect Days, which opened throughout Israel on Thursday, is more like moving in with a person you’ve never met before for a few days than seeing a movie.

That person is Hirayama (Koji Yakusho, who won the Best Actor Award at Cannes last year for his performance), a taciturn older man who works cleaning toilets in Tokyo.

He lives alone, in a tiny but not untypical Tokyo dwelling, where he sleeps on a futon and keeps beautiful plants. He spends his free time reading great works of literature and listening to classic rock & roll, and the soundtrack features songs by Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Otis Redding, The Animals, and many others.

The life of a toilet cleaner in Tokyo

One of the enigmatic cleaner’s pleasures is photographing trees in the park, and he eats a sandwich on the same bench each day. Someone is playing a long game of tic-tac-toe with him by leaving a piece of paper in the bathrooms he cleans, but there is no indication who it is. He bathes in a public bath and occasionally goes out to a neighborhood restaurant/bar, where he seems to be mildly interested in the proprietress, and is friendly with some of the other old dudes who hang out there.

When I say that the hero is taciturn, I mean that he makes Gary Cooper in High Noon seem like a chatterbox. But somehow, he has this inner calm and radiance that will charm you into enjoying the rhythm of his routine – or not. At the screening where I saw the movie, a fair percentage of the people in the row in front of me fell asleep and remained in dreamland for most of its running time. I stayed awake, but there were moments when I wondered where this film, by the eclectic master director Wim Wenders (who cowrote it with Takuma Takasaki), was headed.

At times, it seems it’s going to be about conflicts with his younger partner, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), who lacks his preternatural reticence – the guy can’t stop talking – and his work ethic. Takashi is frequently late and works sloppily, knowing Hirayama will make sure everything is sparkling clean.

For those who are squeamish about what a movie about a public toilet cleaner would be like, it’s important to keep in mind that this movie is set in Tokyo, one of the cleanest cities in the world, where there is truly a culture of kindness and considerateness, so there really isn’t much mess.

I thought for a while that Hirayama would become a father figure to Takashi, or put him in his place, but instead he ends up bonding with Takashi’s sometime girlfriend over a Patti Smith cassette. It also seems that a romance may develop with the female bar owner.

But the underlying mystery at the heart of the film is why this obviously intelligent man is working at this job. There is no hint of a business failure, divorce, or scandal that wiped him out and forced him into this lowly occupation.

Eventually, his niece and, later, his sister, show up, and we learn he is from a wealthy family and that his father has quickly progressing dementia. But while he seems to enjoy his niece’s company, he has little to say to his sister, who arrives in a chauffeur-driven limo, and he refuses to see his father.

In the end, Hirayama reminded me of the quiet angel played by Otto Sander in Wings of Desire, Wenders’s 1987 masterpiece about invisible otherworldly beings who are everywhere and nowhere in modern-day Berlin, and who hover around people, occasionally giving them a sense of well-being.

Yakusho is perfectly cast in the lead role here, and if Wenders ever does a remake of Wings set in Japan, Yakusho should definitely appear in it.

He is one of Japan’s most celebrated actors, and played the raffish gangster in Tampopo and the family man tempted by a dance instructor in the original Shall We Dance? which was later remade with Richard Gere.

In Perfect Days, he’s like that neighbor who gives you a great smile every time you pass each other, but about whom you know nothing. Wenders doesn’t reveal all that much about him here, but it’s relaxing to spend some time in his peaceful, well-balanced world.