#film

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.

The film opens on two people at a bar, a third beside them, and someone — we don't know who yet — watching from across the room, trying to read the dynamic. Celine Song holds the shot longer than comfort recommends, letting the viewer do the interpretive work before she tells us anything. Past Lives (2023) earns that patience across its whole length.

Shabier Kirchner's cinematography works in grey-blue New York interiors and pale Seoul afternoons. The palette doesn't dramatize; it observes at a middle distance. I watched this on a Sunday evening, second time through, blinds half-drawn and the light fading outside — which turned out to be the right conditions. The film rewards a certain quietness rather than cinematic largeness. It doesn't reach for grandeur and doesn't need to.

Song's structural device — three time periods, roughly twenty-four years compressed into two hours — is familiar enough from literary fiction. What she does with it is keep the ellipses visible. The jumps aren't smoothed; we feel the gap as duration. Greta Lee carries most of that weight across the decades with a stillness that reads as held breath rather than blankness. It sounds to me as if Song is more interested in how longing changes shape than in whether it ever resolves.

The shot that stays with me: Calum standing at the edge of a Turkish resort pool at night, the water lit an unsettled blue, a video camera pointed at nothing in particular. Aftersun, Charlotte Wells, 2022. He's framing something he won't look at directly. That's the film's whole grammar — oblique angles, domestic videotape grain pressing against the digital image as though memory can't quite settle on a single format.

I saw it last night at Cinema Nova, alone in a Thursday evening session, about eight rows back. The screen felt exactly the right size — not wide enough to be spectacular, just wide enough to feel observed. Gregory Oke's cinematography keeps a strange, considered distance from its subjects: handheld but not agitated, as if the camera is trying not to intrude on something it has already interrupted.

The pacing is unhurried in the way that Turkish holiday afternoons actually are. Long stretches of not much happening, then a cut that lands sideways. Wells uses the interpolated camcorder footage less as flashback than as texture — a bleached, slightly overexposed warmth that the main image doesn't reach for, a different register of the same time.