A janitor in Japan drives between jobs listening to rock music.

Japan’s contender for ‘Best International Feature Film’ at this year’s Oscars is a character study that follows a Tokyo janitor as he goes about his daily routine cleaning toilets across the city. It is called ‘Perfect Days’ and it comes from celebrated German director Wim Wenders, with the leading role of Hirayama played by Kōji Yakusho. You could call it a slice of life drama in that its focus is on the routine of the everyday, with the loose structure focusing on four short segments involving Hirayama and the people he works and interacts with over the course of the movie.

Hirayama’s days follow a similar approach – he gets up and goes to work, cleaning various toilets across the city, before stopping at the same vendor for some food and going home to read a book, sleep and repeat the next day. When he’s travelling about he often listens to old rock music on cassettes, and we get a sense that alongside music and reading his other passion is nature, from the way he looks at and photographs the trees in Tokyo’s inner city parks. He occasionally visits a public bathroom, goes to a bookstore and looks after his plants, but his days follow a similar pattern and most of his interactions are by design and not spontaneous. The ‘stories’ within the movie focus on Hirayama helping out a colleague who needs money to take out a girl he likes, reconnecting with his niece after not seeing her for several years, and bonding with the female owner of a restaurant he sometimes frequents. Aside from these strands, there is a recurring game of tic-tac-toe with a stranger via a bit of paper left behind in a toilet stall.

‘Perfect Days’ isn’t really about these individual stories though – they add a bit of colour and some narrative momentum but what it is really about is the joy and the sadness of the everyday, and an exploration of how one man interacts with the world that he lives in. Yakusho’s performance is truly brilliant at guarding his emotions – we may assume he’s lonely because he lives alone but is he? We will have to form our own judgements. Similarly, the way Wenders chooses to conclude the film is literally perfect as a summation of who Hirayama is and what the film is trying to convey. The music choices are well selected, no moreso than Lou Reed’s wonderful ‘Perfect Day’ which is the perfect blend of happy, romantic and bittersweet and a perfect fit for the tone of this movie (and it of course gives the film its title).

‘Perfect Days’ isn’t an action packed drama but it is undoubtedly a thoughtful and poetic movie about the everyday life of one man in a large city and I found myself really swept up in Hirayama’s story.

Rating: 4/5

Directed By: Wim Wenders

Starring: Kōji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano, Aoi Yamada, Yumi Asō, Sayuri Ishikawa, Tomokazu Miura and Min Tanaka

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/