It should be boring – but it never is: Perfect Days reviewed

Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days is a film about a Tokyo public toilet cleaner and if the gentle, meditative narrative doesn’t grab you, the toilets almost certainly will. (Trust me. They’re incredible.)

It stars Koji Yakusho and, as much as it is set in Tokyo, it is also set on Yakusho’s face, which is so expressive and open that it’s capable of conveying depths of emotion even when in repose. It could be boring, this film, except it’s impossible to get bored of that face. And Wenders knows what he has and rarely strays from it.

Yakusho plays Hirayama, a middle-aged man who says very little – barely a word for the first 40 minutes. He lets his face do the talking. His life is held together by habit and routine. He rents a small, basic apartment and every day is the same. He wakes in the morning, neatly folds his futon, waters his houseplants, grabs a coffee from the vending machine just outside, drives to work in his van while playing cassettes of rock and pop: Patti Smith, the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison and, most pertinently, Lou Reed, hence the film’s title.

Tokyo, it seems, isn’t like London, where needing the bathroom necessitates an epic odyssey of despair to somewhere disgusting. Tokyo takes pride in its toilets. They’ve been designed by well-known architects. One looks like a space ship, another like a fort constructed from driftwood, a third like a giant, squat mushroom. And Hirayama takes pride in them. He sprays and mops and polishes with care, and while you and I would rather be dead than wipe out a urinal, he does not appear dissatisfied by his job in any way. He always breaks for lunch (a sandwich) in a little park where he photographs the sunlight breaking though the tree canopies with an actual camera using actual film.