There is a moment early in Perfect Days — Wim Wenders, 2023 — where Hirayama tilts his face up through the windshield of his cleaning van at the light coming through the trees, and the film holds on that look for longer than it needs to. Not a reaction shot. Not a bridge to the next scene. Just a man looking at light through leaves, and the film trusting that this is enough.
I saw it on Tuesday evening at Cinema Nova, alone in the back third of the auditorium. Late session, maybe a dozen people in the room. That kind of sparseness suits it — it would have felt strange to watch in a crowd.
The film is structured almost liturgically: wake, work, eat, sleep, repeat. Wenders doesn't vary this rhythm until it needs to vary, and the discipline is precise. What carries each day forward is the cassette deck in Hirayama's van — the Animals, Van Morrison, the Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" played without context or commentary. The tapes are not explained. The music is not curated for our benefit. It is simply there, the way music is when it belongs to someone's life rather than to a soundtrack.
Koji Yakusho carries the film with almost no dialogue. His face is doing the grammar of the thing. I read his performance as deliberately withholding — not suppressed emotion exactly, more like a person who has learned not to want explanation. Whether that reads as contentment or as an adaptation to loss the film leaves genuinely open, which it seems to me is the correct decision.
What the film is not trying to do: it is not an argument about simplicity, not a pastoral fantasy about opting out. Hirayama has a job and does it. Tokyo is loud and dense around the edges of his quiet. The film doesn't tidy this into a lesson.
What it perhaps doesn't quite reach: a subplot involving his niece arrives and recedes without fully earning its weight in the final act. It is meant, I think, to destabilise the liturgy, and it does — but the resolution lands more softly than the disruption required.
The last shot, Yakusho's face cycling through something I don't have a single word for — not grief, not joy, both at once and differently weighted each second. I watched it and said nothing aloud, which is, I think, exactly what the film was after.
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