Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival
Perfect Days—thankfully a more ironic title than it initially appears—is, of course, borrowed from the quasi-eponymous Lou Reed song. That song, an immensely misunderstood ode to a rather more conflicted sort of day than it appears, eventually bursts into a chorus of “You’re going to reap just what you sow,” which has a distinctly threatening edge.
Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, Wim Wenders’ most recent movie in a surprisingly prolific late career, songs appear to play a pretty straightforward role in explicating the main character’s feelings: all the needle-drops here, taken from a tape of ’60s music that the main character plays in the car, seem to express his current frame of mind. At first, this chimes with what seems like a very simple, not to say simplistic narrative set-up.
Over and over, we are shown the almost totally uneventful daily routine of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) as he rises, clears away his fold-down futon, brushes his teeth, trims the bristles of his mustache with a small pair of scissors, and chooses a tape to play on his way to work, which consists of cleaning public toilets around Tokyo. On his lunch break he sits in the same park and takes photos of trees. At the end of his day, he eats in a cafe; on his days off he rides his bicycle to the public baths and scrubs himself thoroughly.