There is a scene about forty minutes in where Hirayama pauses beside a tree in a Tokyo park, holds a small film camera up to his eye, and simply waits. Wim Wenders stays with him — the frame doesn't cut, the music doesn't cue. You feel the patience as a formal decision rather than a stylistic flourish.
Perfect Days, directed by Wenders and released in 2023, follows a Tokyo public-toilet cleaner through days that repeat without quite replicating. I watched it on Tuesday evening at the Nova on Lygon Street, in a half-empty theatre, rain audible on the roof during the quietest passages. That helped. The film wants stillness around it.
Wenders shoots the city in a high-contrast palette that makes light through leaves look closer to photography than cinema. The recurring sequences where Hirayama raises his camera to frame what he calls komorebi — dappled light — become a quiet argument about the ethics of attention. The pacing matches: long establishing shots, unhurried transitions, a deliberate refusal to score each emotional beat with a corresponding swell.
What the film is not trying to do is explain why a man with evident education and sensitivity lives this particular life. It holds that as a given and watches him inside it. That is a disciplined choice, and mostly the right one.
Where it strains, for me, is in the second half, where supporting characters begin carrying the theme more explicitly than the texture needs. The film's argument grows slightly more legible than it should. But Kôji Yakusho's performance keeps things from becoming schematic — he stays particular, present, without sentiment doing the work for him.
A film quiet enough that the rain outside felt like part of it.
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