Perfect Days (2023)

User Review

• 

  Barneyonmovies

  9 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: Wim Wenders and Takuma Takasaki's 'Perfect Days,' follows the daily life of a man called Hariyama (Kolji Yakusho) who cleans toilets in Tokyo, and the result is a beautiful examination of the human condition.
  
  At first, Hariyama seems wholly contempt with his simple, solitary life. He gets up early every morning to the sound of a woman brushing the pavement, and then carefully waters his plants. He takes pride in his work scrubbing toilets spotless, and has his lunch break in a park to photograph trees with an old camera. He spends his spare time reading books and listening to fittingly contemplative music like The Velvet Underground. And he has an appreciation for anyone else he sees admiring the everyday, but none for the complaints and concerns of his anxious young apprentice.
  
  Especially when set against the backdrop of a busy yet beautiful Tokyo, that makes for a wonderfully moving message about being contempt with what you've got and not chasing the next thing. As his niece realises when she comes to stay with Hariyama, there's beauty in the here and now, and that can be reason enough to live.
  
  That's a profound message on its own, but then Hariyama is thrown some bad days to disrupt his routine, and that allows the film to say even more about the realities of mindfulness than it does in its first half. His sister comes to collect his niece and turns her nose up at his lifestyle, and he's reminded of his troubled childhood. His apprentice suddenly quits and his boss makes him cover both shifts so he has to spend his day rushing around the city. And then he meets a man with terminal cancer who is depressed about how his life feels as meaningless as his death.
  
  All of that shows how hard it can be in reality to stay in touch with what makes life worth living, especially when you're a working person who's stretched in different directions every day. The final shot of Hariyama as he struggles to put a smile on his face on the drive to work sums this up beautifully, and makes for a moving end to a quietly profound little film.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: For what it does, there's nothing wrong with it.
  
  VERDICT: Wim Wenders' 'Perfect Days,' is a gentle but profound film about living for the everyday, and how hard that can be.

  Like?

  1 member likes this review.