Wim Wenders’ first narrative feature to be nominated for an Academy Award, Perfect Days is beautifully shot and perfectly edited but is not the perfect film some have dubbed it as it often feels flat in its repetitiveness, too much like Groundhog Day. Despite the benign satisfaction that protagonist Hirayama, so named for the many Hirayamas in Ozu’s films, takes in his daily routine, he is an elderly version of the lonely, isolated, alienated young men who can relate to children but are terrified of women that populate Wenders’ early films. Wenders, in fact, includes deliberate references to those films. Like Bruno in Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976), Hirayama reads Faulkner, and on his last trip to his local bookstore, he purchases a novel by Patricia Highsmith, whose Ripley’s Game was adapted by Wenders to become The American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund, 1977). (The bookstore which Hirayama visits repeatedly may itself be a nod to Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Café Lumière [2003], another less than inspiring attempt to channel Ozu.)
Hirayama photographs routinely with a now-archaic, small, point-and-shoot film camera, heir to Philip’s exploration of all manner of photography in Alice in the Cities (Alice in den Städten, 1974), and he listens to rock music from the 1960s and 70s like all of Wenders’ characters from that era. Hirayama’s music comes from his large collection of cassette tapes, another throwback to the 20th century, while the diegetic rock music in the early films generally came from the radio.
Perfect Days ends almost exactly as Kings of the Road does. A close-up of Hirayama driving his van, while Nina Simone’s rendition of Feeling Good (which originated in the 1964 musical The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd) blares on the sound track, echoes Kings, which ends with a close-up of Bruno driving while Roger Miller’s 1964 ballad King of the Road plays. The “protagonist” in both sixties ballads is an outsider who sings of life apart from the constraints of society. The only difference in these two final sequences is that the shot of Hirayama is severely frontal while that of Bruno is lateral. The severity in the framing and cutting in Perfect Daysmay be another homage to Ozu, but it also reflects the severity of the life choices Hirayama has made.
Unlike Wenders’ early films, which were road movies—messy, energetic and pressing forward, despite having little in the way of plot—Perfect Days has a cyclical structure, intended, perhaps, to evoke Ozu, but also in keeping with the fact that Hirayama, as an older man, has settled on his life choices and adopted a routine that varies little from day to day.
The protagonists in Wenders’ early films struggle against history, American hegemony, and bourgeois conformity, but similar struggles, primarily against the salaryman life expected of middle class Japanese men, are in Hirayama’s past. He has broken with his family. We are told his father stopped speaking to him—reminiscent of the confrontation between Robert and his father in Kings—and now the father has dementia, but Hirayama still refuses to visit him. This refusal, along with the visit from his niece and sister, are the only indications that Hirayama is still processing the alienation that drove him to become a toilet cleaner. Otherwise, his life is composed of set routines that seem to please him but which render the film rather dull. Perfect Days attempts to capture a kind of Zen stasis, the mu that Ozu so treasured, but mu, often translated as nothingness, indicates a nothingness that is the gateway to sublimity. The nothingness in Perfect Days—despite brief interludes of pathos, charm and humor—seems mostly to be just nothingness.