Perfect Days * * * * ½

Hirayama takes time between cleaning the toilets to consider the sunlight in the trees.

Wim Wenders is a busy film maker but he tends to mostly do fascinating documentaries, such as Salt of the Earth.  However, once in a while he makes a drama and he usually gets it right, like: Wings of Desire or Paris Texas. 

Perfect Days is his latest drama and Boy, has he got it right with this one!

There is an interesting backstory as to how this came about. Tokyo Toilets is a real business. They are the best public toilets in the world.  Tokyo Toilets asked Wim Wenders if he would like to make a documentary on them, but when he started putting it together he realised he had the material to make a feature film, so he teamed up with Japanese poet Takuma Takasaki to write a script.   

The film stars the renowned and senior Japanese actor Koji Yakusho who plays Hirayama the toilet cleaner.   

We see him go through his daily routine and it's always the same.  He wakes up each morning to the sound of another cleaner, a man who is manually sweeping the street outside his window.  We watch Hirayama wash and put on his overalls, water his pot-plants, grab his personals, he gets a takeaway coffee from a vending machine and then off to work. 

He has a tape deck in his little van on which he plays his impeccable collection of 60' and 70's music. The sounds of his generation. 

He is scrupulous with his cleaning and unfailingly polite.  If someone needs to use the toilet, he waits outside until they have finished. Sometimes he looks up at the sky and considers the dappled sunlight in the branches of the trees (Komorebi) and photographs it in black and white with a 35mm film camera.

After a while another toilet cleaner comes onto the scene.  The delightful and next to useless Takashi  who turns the story in another direction as he inanely waffles on about needing money to date a go-go girl who waits lounging on his motor scooter as he works, and how much Hirayama's cassette collection is worth. 

When Hirayama finishes at the end of the day, or on his day off, he remains a man of very few words. He likes to eat and drink at the same modest places where he is  always warmly welcomed.  He goes to the bath house. He drops his films off for development and he visits the same second-hand bookstore, where the owner seems to have read everything in the store.

Arriving home one day he finds his niece on his doorstep.  A sixteen year old runaway.  He looks after her until his sister comes to collect her and with that we have the only insight into Hirayama's past. Nothing is really explained but telling words are spoken.  

Later he talks with a man by the river and their conversation turns into a delightful childish game.

After that it is back to the usual routine for Hirayama. Or is it?  There are some very subtle moments and gestures in this film that certainly left me thinking.

I have to admit, if someone says to you it's just a two hour movie on some bloke cleaning dunnies, they'd be right.  It could look like that.

But if someone said it's the most remarkable film they have seen on how to live modestly, quietly and  unassumingly but  with self respect, they'd be right too.

(Finally after seeing the Tokyo Toilets , I have to ask what must the Japanese think when they are unfortunate enough to use one of our truly disgusting public lavatories? Even the ones at our airports are bad enough! There, indeed, is another lesson to be learnt from Hirayama).