Perfect Days
10 April 2024, mid-morning
I was off to the Lightbox last Friday watch Wim Wenders latest film, Perfect Days, a film following the quiet life of a Tokyo sanitation worker, played wonderfully by Koji Yakusho. The audience experiences the perfects days of the films protagonist Hirayama, the structure and repetition of his life. Each day Hirayama wakes up to the sound of a women sweeping the street. He brushes his teeth, trims his moustache and shaves, and gets dressed. He picks up the keys and camera and change he put away the previous night at his door before heading out to start his day. He buys himself a coffee from a vending machine and heads off to work. And so on and so forth. His days are simple, but quietly joyous. The film shows us the patterns of his life, and the audience intuits whats going on through the little snapshots of his life that follow as we experience subsequent days of his life. The movie is meditative. There is very little dialogue. Koji Yakusho’s performance is incredible. This was a wonderful film.