Wim Wenders green laurels at the age of 78 with the film Perfect days, now on the billboard. The trajectory of the German filmmaker has been irregular, because he shone at the beginning in the seventies, with titles such as Alicia en las ciudades or El amigo americano, and then declined with others that gave him a reputation as presumptuous. Now, Perfect days once again proves his talent as a filmic storyteller. It's a rather long film – a whim of today's cinema, as widespread as it is burdensome – and it tells an unglamorous story: the day-to-day life of a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. His routine seems devoid of interest, but perhaps for some it will mean a vital discovery.
Hirayama, the protagonist of this film that links perfect days, is one of the 38 million inhabitants of Tokyo, the most populous city on the planet. Despite everything, it would be said that he resides in a particular world. He lives alone, maintains limited social relationships, speaks the minimum and divides his time between work, which he executes neatly, conscientiously, and unsullied leisure time, based on the contemplation of trees, reading and music. He lives alone but keeps his senses awake and alert, also his capacity for empathy and generosity.
In his cramped van, during work trips, Hirayama listens to old cassettes, perhaps inspired by Wenders' own playlist. It's an excellent selection of pop classics, ranging from The Animals' The House of the Rising Sun to Nina Simone's Feeling Good to Patti Smith's Redondo Beach, [ Sittin'on] the dock of the bay d 'Otis Redding or Brown eyed girl by Van Morrison. Not forgetting Lou Reed's Perfect day, one of the many gems included on his Transformer album, which he released 52 years ago.
In Perfect day, Reed describes his youthful idea of a perfect day: going to the park to drink sangria or to the zoo to feed the animals or to watch a movie with someone you love, and then go home with that person. In other words, a plan indicated to recharge batteries at the weekend and face on Monday a perhaps less desirable routine, an imperfect life, supposedly inevitable.
Note that Reed titled his song in the singular, and that Wenders titles his film with the same expression, but in the plural. Because Hirayama doesn't wait for the weekend to have a full existence, but has organized his in such a way that every day seems perfect to him, regardless of whether perfection is more of a path than an attainable goal; or that the toilets he cleans are cute, the work of great Japanese architects such as Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito or Shigeru Ban.
For most, a perfect day is something unknown or, by the way, exceptional. For Hirayama – played with expressive restraint by the actor Koji Yakusho – every day is perfect. Not because they come in heaps of material wealth, enroll in privileged circles or cover themselves with any other gold. They are because he does his assigned task as well as he can and even takes time to nurture his senses by enjoying nature or the work of writers and musicians.
There are other worlds, but they are in this one. This phrase attributed to the poet Paul Éluard, a reflection of old romantic or surrealist research, tending to overcome the limits of the conventional, takes on an inverse meaning in Wenders' film, inviting us to rediscover the extraordinary in the ordinary, to return to the essentials, questioning an accelerated and empty present, precisely because its excess of contents trivializes them all and prevents concentrating on just one.
It has been said that this film recreates the cinema of Ozu or Kurosawa and that it exudes an Eastern spirituality. It is likely But it also has roots in Western Stoicism, in authors such as Seneca, who advised us first of all to learn to be content, and that we ask for riches from ourselves, not from fortune.
Some may find it a tearful, blissful film. For others, it will serve to reformulate their theory of the perfect day: to assume that, when the perfect day is posited as an exception, life leaves much to be desired.
