In May 2023, Kôji Yakusho won the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in France, making him the second Japanese actor to receive the Cannes Best Actor accolade in history, following Yûya Yagira from Nobody Knows.
The film that earned him this prestigious award is Perfect Days, directed by German filmmaker Wim Wenders. The movie depicts the daily life and routine of a middle-aged man in Tokyo who works as a toilet janitor. In September this year, Japan announced that this film would be its submission for the Oscars.
At first glance, the combination seems unusual – a German director filming a movie about toilets in Tokyo. Not only did it win an award in France, but it is also representing Japan in the competition for the Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Oscars.
With curiosity, I finally watched the film. Let's talk about it now.
It's said that the initial idea for making this film came from a Japanese production company's invitation to Wim Wenders. They wanted him to come to Japan and create an artistic short film about the beauty of Tokyo toilets. Influenced by Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu, Wim Wenders had a strong affinity for Japanese art, so he accepted the invitation. Not content with just a short film, he collaborated with renowned screenwriter Takuma Takasaki, spending two weeks crafting the screenplay that we see in the final work.
A Simple Story Repeated Every Day
The story begins with Mr. Hirayama waking up in the morning. After being awakened by a janitor sweeping outside his door, he gets up, washes, and puts on a work uniform with 'The Tokyo Toilet' printed on the back. He then goes to the vending machine outside his door, buys a can of coffee, and starts his vehicle. Before driving to work, he takes out a Lou Reed cassette, navigating the city in the sounds of rock music.
At the workplace, he starts by cleaning the garbage and then scrubs the toilet bowl, urinal, and sink. The entire process seems skilled and professional. He even made a small mirror to see the corners of the toilet to ensure they were thoroughly cleaned.
During breaks, he sits on a bench, eats a sandwich, occasionally looks up at the treetops and admires the dappled sunlight shining through the leaves. Once he finds a good view, he picks up his film camera to capture it and smiles contentedly afterward.
After completing his work, he drives home and once again plays Lou Reed's cassette.
He changes into everyday clothes after arriving home, takes his dirty laundry to a nearby laundromat, goes to a public bathhouse, and visits a pub for a drink. Afterward, he goes to a small restaurant to have Japanese food. When he finally returns home, he reads before going to bed, and repeats the same routine the next day.
Throughout the film, Kôji Yakusho's lines are very few. In the first 60 minutes, he has no spoken lines and relies solely on changes in his expression and gaze to convey his calmness and detachment from the world around him.
This is the character the film portrays, a man who cleans toilets at the bottom of society. Day in and day out, he buys coffee, cleans toilets, listens to cassette tapes, explores old books, captures street scenes, baths in a communal bathhouse, and enjoys a drink by the roadside.
This seemingly mundane narrative is the director Wim Wenders paying homage to Yasujiro Ozu in a minimalist way, explaining why this man chooses to live in his world.
Three Details Worth Pondering
Before understanding why Mr. Hirayama chooses to live in his world, the director strategically introduces three details that are worth pondering and fundamental for the audience to reach a consensus. These details reveal who Mr. Hirayama is beyond his life with mechanical repetition.
The three details are his love for Lou Reed's rock music; his enjoyment of reading physical books, listening to songs on cassette tapes, and using a film camera; and the sudden appearance and departure of his niece.
Let's start with Lou Reed's rock music—the title of the film, Perfect Days, is derived from Reed's classic song of the same name. Those familiar with Lou Reed know that his music is deliberately noisy, with a distance between the music and vocals. It's as if he placed broken pieces of copper and old guitars in the foreground for a noisy introduction, then retreated to a corner, softly singing or even silently reciting the lyrics.
In terms of lyrics, his greatest contribution to rock music, much like Baudelaire to poetry and the Marquis de Sade to literature, lies in introducing shocking and taboo themes. The frequent themes of drug use, drug trafficking, group debauchery, blasphemy, and irreverence in Western rock music are the elements introduced by Lou Reed.
Lou Reed's music is rebellious both in form and content. Looking at the silent janitor Mr. Hirayama from this perspective, one realizes that beneath his calm daily habits lies an undercurrent of turmoil and waves.
Thus, we see him making unconventional moves amid his mundane work and life. For instance, he secretly observes a female worker eating lunch on a bench. He also discovers a stranger's chess game drawn on paper in the toilet and plays the next move on the paper, leaving it for the stranger who frequents the restroom.
In essence, the calm exterior is Mr. Hirayama's disguise. Deep down, he has impulses to break free. It's just that he's more likely to leave that impulse behind in Lou Reed's rock music.
The second detail is Mr. Hirayama's habit of reading physical books every night. Consistent with this habit, he uses cassette tapes for music and a film camera for photography. These outdated mediums in today's society are his entire hobby.
The repeated presentation of these medium details, like Mr. Hirayama listening to Lou Reed every time he drives, underscores that he is a person stuck in the past.
When the audience realizes this issue, they will understand why, halfway through the film, arranges for Mr. Hirayama's niece to appear and then be picked up by his sister.
All the emotional points in the film find release in his sister's line, 'Go back and see Dad. He's not the same as before.' With this extremely restrained third detail, the film lets the audience know why Mr. Hirayama chooses to live in his world.
As we age, we tend to live more authentically because we have been deeply hurt by the world. In other words, it's not that we become more self-centered as we live, but rather, it's a protective armor we develop to avoid being hurt.
Homage to Yasujiro Ozu
In addition to the restrained cinematography and narrative style, the low-angle shooting technique that brings the main character back to the hurt caused by his family in a small detail, it's another concrete manifestation of director Wim Wenders paying homage to Yasujiro Ozu.
Those familiar with Wim Wenders know that despite being German, he has a considerable fascination with Japanese culture and art. Due to his admiration for Yasujiro Ozu, he shot a documentary film called Tokyo-Ga in 1985. With Perfect Days, he also goes to great lengths to pay tribute to Yasujiro Ozu.
In addition to the signature tatami mat perspective, fixed shots, and simple editing, Ozu's films always maintain a polite restraint in his characters' demeanor and rarely lose control of their emotions. Wenders pays the utmost tribute to these external Ozu elements in the film.
Even more remarkable is that Wim Wenders not only pays homage to Ozu's external elements but also adeptly plays with the emotional core of Ozu's stories.
It's well-known that Ozu's films while appearing warm, are worldly and even cold. Just like a detail in Tokyo Story, where the elderly parents want to visit Tokyo, but their adult children coldly reject their wishes. The coldness lies in the fact that each child genuinely has their difficulties, making the rejection reasonable and even understandable.
In other words, Ozu saw through the mundane aspects of daily life, revealing the enormous tragic nature behind them. He wanted to remind us: accept loss, accept separation, accept cruelty; only then can you live peacefully.
Perfect Days perfectly inherit this point.
From the appearance of Mr. Hirayama's niece leading to his sister, the director reminds us in that detail: although he does the lowest-tier job, Mr. Hirayama is not inherently a bottom-tier person. On the contrary, he comes from a good family background. However, he chose his current lifestyle due to irreconcilable conflicts with his father.
This is where Perfect Days has inherited the essence of Ozu.
Of course, in addition to these aspects, viewers can interpret more phenomena and content from this film based on their viewing habits. For example, from a sociological perspective, one can see the plight of elderly workers. From a political science standpoint, one can observe a proletarian who willingly labors, and so on.
If viewers can interpret likes or dislikes from other perspectives, it also proves the brilliance of Perfect Days: it achieves simplicity, and as a result, presents a film with an all-encompassing openness.
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