Hirayama’s (Koji Yakusho) life is defined by routine.  He wakes in the morning to the sounds of the streets coming to life, waters his plants, dresses for work and collects his things, grabs his coffee from the vending machine, then presses play on the cassette tape du jour after smiling up at the Tokyo Skytree during his morning commute.  After a long day of cleaning restrooms across the city, he enjoys a bowl of noodles from his favorite restaurant before retiring to his apartment to read before bed. 

Wim Wenders directs Perfect Days, a meditative examination of the simple pleasures of life co-written with Takuma Takasaki.  The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to wide acclaim, netting Yakusho with the distinction of Best Actor and awarding Wenders the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, making it another resplendent feather in the cap of Neon who handled the US release of the film.  The joint production between Japan and Germany runs a meandering 124 minutes, but its simple spiritedness responded well with audiences, earning the film a spot on the ballot for Best International Feature at the 96th Academy Awards.  

The character structure of the film is very emblematic of the Inyo, a Japanese symbol that represents the separate as a part of the whole.  Wenders is not shy about trying to show the divide between Hirayama and the expectations for what a man his age should be doing.  After returning a lost boy (Kisuke Shimazaki) to his mother (Yuriko Kawasaki) in the park where he is cleaning, the mother barely thanks Hirayama, but quickly begins to disinfect the boy’s hands.  Later, his sister, Keiko (Yumi Asô), makes her displeasure known about his occupation cleaning toilets and the meager living which he embraces when compared to her more affluent lifestyle.  Wenders is not looking to hide his thesis behind metaphor here, the working class is the backbone of a rich society, but those who get to enjoy the conveniences of modern life tend to see the workers who make that possible as part of a class beneath them.  Both Keiko and the woman in the park look at Hirayama with a shade of scorn in their eyes, even his co-worker Takashi (Tokio Emoto) does not understand why Hirayama puts so much care into his work. 

Wenders is also quick to point out that, despite his solitary lifestyle, the man lives a full and robust life all the same.  Music, poetry, and photography, all notably in their physical form, are all prominent pastimes of Hirayama’s.  The film says that Hirayama’s simple life is the fullest of all of these other characters because he is the one who takes his time to enjoy the art.  It is a loving ode to the power of creativity and a beacon of hope for those who put out into the world and may feel discouraged that there is no audience, but this message shows just how cruel the film is to this man.  To give Wenders and Takasaki the benefit of the doubt, they did not set out to tear Hirayama down, but in the construction of their narrative – an almost spiritual cousin to The Book of Job – they contradict everything they told us about Hirayama in the end. After establishing with audiences that Hirayama is very content in his life, the script follows a cycle of people entering and disrupting his orbit only to be taken away as he begins to open up to change and welcome them into his routine.  It waves relationships in his face- music enthusiast Aya (Aoi Yamada), his niece Niko (Arisa Nakano), and Mama (Sayuri Ishikawa), the divorced owner of one of Hirayama’s favorite bars – as something he should be striving for, but then the script spits in his face after he welcomes them. He lives, what social norms will tell us, is a sad and lonely life, but the only time we ever see this man cry is at the end when Wenders and Takasaki are done teasing him with what they will not allow him to have; that human connection.  Maybe it is the memory of those people that brings a smile to his face through his tears, but the script does not do enough to prove that this is not just a mean-spirited prank but rather a pure testament to the happiness that can be found within. 

To be generous, this dichotomy between what the film states and what the film shows is all working towards its greater paradoxical nature.  It is showy in its minimalism as if Wenders had dared himself to strip a narrative down to its barest and basest form, and while he was successful in doing that, it’s hard to call Perfect Days a narrative at all with its formless arcs and near-silent protagonist. Sure there are characters and the faintest whiffs of a plot, but it is so far removed from the maximalist qualities as seen in his earlier works – The American Friend (1977), Until the End of the World (1991) – that it feels like this film would have been better suited as the wordless documentary about Japanese public restrooms that it was being reported as amidst the buzz of its admittance into the Cannes lineup.  Even the director’s more meditative pieces from the past – Paris, Texas (1984), Wings of Desire (1987) – had some real weight and story behind them and their characters had some defined motivations.  From the logline, one feels like they are getting deep into Hiryama’s psyche and uncovering something close, but in reality, this man is just as much a stranger to us at the beginning of the film as he is at the end. This film, like a road movie but on a closed-circuit course, does not rise to the level of expectation we have for Wenders, and maybe then, with that in mind, the fault of its soft landing is just as much on us as the audience as it is on the writer/director’s choice of avenue into Hirayama’s story. Perfect Days, as presented, is a reflection on what it means to live a life, a common theme across Wender’s entire body of work, but outside of his specific oeuvre, it is very much in conversation with the other late-career entries from his contemporaries, albeit it is much more experimental in that it is challenging the very idea of narrative cinema.