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.