Perfect Days movie review & film summary (2024) – Roger Ebert

The peripatetic German-born director Wim Wenders, now 78, has drawn almost as a lot inspiration from Japan over his profession as he has the U.S. Two of his Nineteen Eighties documentaries, “Tokyo-ga” and “Pocket book on Cities and Garments,” are set there, as is a piece of his 1991 epic elegy for all times on earth, “Till the Finish of the World.” Sure aspects of Asian philosophy recommend Japan as a spot by which one would possibly search serenity, or reside out concepts of serenity, and for Wenders the implacable digital camera model of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu has usually been a mannequin. For this late movie, “Excellent Days,” Wenders depicts the orderly, ascetic, however culturally wealthy lifetime of an older Tokyo resident who works in sanitation. Venerable Japanese actor Koji Yakusho (“Shall We Dance?”) performs Hirayama, who cleans high-end public bathrooms within the modern Shibuya district of Tokyo. A trim man with salt and pepper hair and a meek method underneath which one sees a robust charisma that’s been put underneath a willed bushel, he will get up each morning in his modest condominium and drives a van into city, enjoying his exceptionally curated cassette assortment on the automotive stereo. 

Tunes embody The Animals’ model of “The Home of the Rising Solar;” “Pale Blue Eyes” by The Velvet Underground, and “Sunny Afternoon,” from The Kinks. The Kinks have an necessary place in Wenders’ filmography; in his basic “The American Good friend,” the doomed framer performed by Bruno Ganz sings alongside softly with that group’s “Too A lot on My Thoughts” in his atelier throughout one among his imperfect days. And, after all, Velvet Underground chief Lou Reed has one other track on this soundtrack (guess which) and appeared in Wenders’ sprawling contribution to post-Chilly-Struggle worldwide relations, “Faraway So Shut!” which additionally featured a cameo from Mikhail Gorbachev. Alone in his automotive, wanting on the solar arising, having fun with the music, Hirayama appears to glory in simply being current on this second of life. 

And whereas this can be a largely solitary life, there’s something about its particulars that speaks to a maybe particularly male type of want success. That’s, the need for a “significant” solitude that goes hand in hand with a want, after a sure age, to only be let be by the world itself. Hirayama solely listens to music on cassette; in a extra demonstrative type of character, this would appear a near-insufferable emblem of hipster fetishization (and that is one thing the film really takes up), however with Hirayama, you decide up extra of an “all the things in its proper place” vibe. 

Not a lot occurs. There’s plenty of magnificence in Hirayama’s world, together with the parks by which the designer bathrooms are located, and a darkish little bar-restaurant and its quiet feminine proprietor with whom Hirayama varieties a halting affinity. At evening our hero reads, and when he goals, he goals in black and white, in imaginative sequences finished in collaboration with Wenders’ spouse Donata, a photographer. 

Some critics have deemed Wenders’ squeaky-clean take a look at the lifetime of a man who, we repeat, cleans bathrooms for a residing, as considerably evasive. It is true that Wenders takes a reasonably scrubbed method to sanitation work. Which to a sure extent displays the truth that these installations are virtually artwork objects, however however…