Are you ready for a surprisingly good film? Perfect Days, starring Koji Yakusho, is a new film directed by Wim Wenders that is a visual portrait of a man who lives a very simple life in Tokyo.

Perfect Days is the story of Hirayama, a man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo. He lives a simple life with a focus on finding tranquility in his daily tasks, but even a simple life has its pressures and complexities that create poignant moments of self-reflection as he experiences the joy and pain that come with the consequences of his choices.

This is a beautifully filmed Japanese movie with English subtitles, but don’t let that stop you from watching it. Like Godzilla Minus One, this film is so well written, directed, and acted that you could remove the subtitles and still understand exactly what is happening. That is a rare gift in a film and of all the films that I have seen recently, only a few have been so well done that language was unnecessary to understand and feel the impact of the story, those films include The Quiet Girl, Godzilla Minus One, and now Perfect Days.

Hirayama’s life may seem simple due to the regularity of his daily experiences. He wakes, he hears his neighbor sweeping outside, he showers, and he goes to work cleaning public toilets. Throughout his day, he sees the same strange man walking through the city, he plays a game, he eats lunch in the park, and he reads a book before bed. There is comfort in the pattern of his life.

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The visual elements of the film are poetic in how they are filmed from the angles to the objects and locations. There is a visceral humanness to the visual side of the story with the artistic interpretation of the public toilet buildings and the spaces around them. There is a constant humming and thrumming of life that Hirayama facilitates in his work, and he takes pride in doing his job well.

In contrast, we see his young, twenty-something coworker breezing in and out of the film, making excuses, creating drama, and asking Hirayama for favors. On the surface, it would be easy to look down on Takashi and the chaos he brings into Hirayama’s life, but he also serves as a foil to better understand Hirayama, what’s important to him, and the simple pleasures that he finds in the world around him … such as the cassette tapes of American music from the 1960s and 1970s.

The Perfect Days soundtrack is fantastic. The song choices all have meaning at the point in the story when they are played from The Animals to the Stones, Van Morrison, and Nina Simone. Each song highlights a moment that either enhances or creates contrast within the story, and it might seem odd for a Japanese film to feature so American music, but that in itself is part of the story and the history (for good or ill) of how American culture has infiltrated Japanese culture after World War II.

Through about the first third of the film we see Hirayama in his daily routine, until Takashi upends that routine, exposing the cracks that are hidden beneath the tranquility that Hirayama has created for himself. Despite the stress cracks that Takashi reveals, Hirayama still rises above the challenge, making choices that resonate with his character and make him such a compelling and thoughtful man that commands a gentle respect despite, or perhaps because of, his chosen profession of taking care of something so personal, important, and invisible as the public toilets in the Tokyo city center.

However, the real power of the film comes with the arrival of Hirayama’s runaway niece. We see a completely different side of the man without him changing anything about himself because we suddenly see him through Niko’s eyes as she watches her uncle clean. Her face shows some initial embarrassment, but then he wins her over and she almost shyly begins helping him and finds her own peace and solace in manual labor. Their relationship is tender and fragile in its newness. You can tell that neither of them are quite comfortable with each other at first, giving us a look at what his choices have cost him regarding his own family when his sister finally shows up to take Niko home.

There is also a deep artistry in how the film processes Hirayama’s daily experiences during his dreams at night through the use of faded or distorted images of earlier scenes. The dream images seem to act as visual representations of his unrealized desires, hopes, and struggles that leave us desperately wanting more for him while knowing that this is the life he has chosen for himself and that despite the cracks that are showing, he has found peace. And that is more than most of us can claim about our own lives. As the film ends, we’re left with a mix of feelings that blend sadness and joy together so that you don’t know if you should be crying or laughing or both.

Perfect Days is truly a gorgeously film. Because of how it’s constructed, the language barrier is minimal. You can follow along or not with the subtitles and completely get the story and feel Hirayama’s life. The film is just over 2 hours, and does start to feel a little long around 1 hour and 40 minutes into the story, but as the film wraps up, there is a feeling of completeness that you get that makes the whole experience feel like you have gotten a rare and intimate glimpse into the small truths of a person’s life that you would normally never see without quietly looking into a mirror at yourself and really seeing your own daily pain, love, and struggles broken down into their simplest forms.

So, Perfect Days, have you seen it? It’s currently playing on some planes, which is where I saw it. It’s also on Hulu and other streaming services. I highly recommend it if you are comfortable watching films that use subtitles, if you enjoy films that dive deeply into simple stories, and touch on those small moments in life. If you watch it, definitely let me know what you think of it.

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