Perfect Days

Hirayama wakes up to the sound of an old woman's broom cleaning the yard; he sets up his tatami with a blanket in the corner of the room, brushes his teeth in the kitchen sink, trims his mustache, shaves his beard, drinks a coffee or soda picked up in the vending machine outside the house, puts on his uniform, and leaves early in the morning.

He drives a small van full of materials that he will use for work; he chooses the audiotape for the day and goes to Tokyo's municipally run public toilets, which he cleans meticulously, precisely, even using a mirror to view the bottoms of the toilets.

He does not hesitate to step away out of respect for privacy when some "customer" approaches and then continues his cleaning.

Given the audiotapes, 70s-80s rock music, and Hirayama's lifestyle pattern it might seem that we are placed in those times instead Wenders does not hesitate to let us know that the 60-year-old thinks Spotify is a store.

He thus moves from bathroom to bathroom every day while also pointing out the technology and contemporary nature of the public restrooms some of which are completely made of glass and become opaque when the door is closed. During his break, Hirayama eats a sandwich while sitting on a forest bench, pulls out the outdated camera to take shots of the tree canopies without framing them to then have them developed and sorted into carefully date-stamped boxes; he picks a few seedlings and gently takes them home where he moisturizes them with a spray bottle.

When he returns from work he takes his bicycle, reaches a thermal bath where he sits on a stool and showers and then soaks in a hot tub.

He usually goes to the same stall in a covered market for dinner, then returns home, reads Faulkner and falls asleep.

Eleven days punctuated by this rhythm, meeting the very young colleague pursuing a potential girlfriend; playing tic-tac-toe from a distance on a slip of paper hidden in a toilet, having various encounters that modulate schematically, without clarifying much else about the biography of this taciturn, anti-technological, quiet man.

Until his niece shows up at his house and until his sister comes to retrieve her: through this anecdote we are able to understand more of his past without revealing too much.

Wenders returns to Tokyo to make a poetic, delicate film about the routines, the rituals of a silent, smiling man who has probably made a choice in his life, the underlying choice that has turned upside down his background, his origins, his experiences, the present that accompanies him and the future that will welcome him. The routine, which is substituted for the hectic life of those who live immersed in technology, is portrayed as in an impressionist fresco through the blurred images of the protagonist's dreams, accompanied by the shots he always takes in the same place, at the same times, at the same foliage.

Listening to The House fo the Rising Sun by the Animals, the music of Van Morrison, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, on audiocassettes fascinates the new generation and the hyper-technological market willing to buy these disused audio instruments as if they were archaeological relics now engulfed by digital music services.

The light-heartedness and gracefulness with which Hirayama moves in his silences but also through his trademark gentleness highlight his respect for privacy and the modesty that nurtures his experience. He manages embarrassment and emotion, the unexpected and the emotional always in a restrained manner even when in the finale his eyes communicate the chaos of impressions he is experiencing, accompanied by listening to Nina Simone's song Feeling Good..

It's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me and I feel good...

The construction of a simple and "authentic" existence could relate to Wim Wenders' biographical strings that transpire in the nostalgic overtones of paths now irreversible in the certainty of having lost something extreme, now lost and irretrievable.