Perfect Days Review: Wim Wenders’s Dubious Fetishization of a Man’s Ordinary Life

Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days suggests a kind of spring cleaning for the filmmaker. Gone are the elaborate concepts and freighted iconography of The American Friend and Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, not to mention of the vastly less impactful fictional films that he’s released in the intervening years. Wenders aims for simplicity here, following a middle-aged man, Hirayama (Yakusho Kôji), as he goes about his day cleaning Tokyo’s toilets, taking pictures of trees, listening to classic rock and pop, reading classic literature, and savoring the humble sources of day-to-day affirmation that we tend to take for granted.

Hirayama’s humility is the gauntlet that Wenders has thrown down for himself. Perfect Days wants to be an invitingly human movie that homes in intensely on the little moments of a man’s life so as to unearth universal truths. There’s a bit of Vittorio de Sica’s micro-texture-minded sensibility swimming around in it, and the impression that Wenders imparts of Hirayama as a god-like figure who surveys the rest of us flawed humans from afar brings to mind the protagonist of Wings of Desire. But the film that haunts Perfect Days more than any other is Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, which followed a bus driver with dreams of being a poet over a few days as he wrestled with the wonder and entrapments of a life that doesn’t quite fulfill him.

That sense of beauty underscored by a fine line of quiet agony kept Paterson’s obsessive celebration of quotidian experience from growing cute or condescending. The film was an astonishing leap forward for Jarmusch, who has often been happy to look down on those who might not have access to his hipster rolodex. By contrast, Perfect Days toes the line between poignant and maudlin, particularly for Wenders’s tendency to fetishize Hirayama as the poor man who knows his place. The film is like the cinematic equivalent of a wealthy artist telling a janitor that he’s lucky because he’s acquainted with real life. And the decision to make him silent for much of the runtime, an observer of pettier folk, doesn’t refute this impression.

A few scenes late in the film hint at trauma that Hirayama may be suppressing, but Wenders generally sees him as a man without warts. He does nothing that would disrupt the exaltation of his purity. Indeed, there’s even something self-congratulatory about an act as simple as how Hirayama drinks the same iced drink after work at his favorite restaurant. In other words, Wenders hasn’t quite escaped one of his straitjackets: characters that scan only as symbols.

The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous. At night, Hirayama, always the eager student of classical art, reads William Faulkner by lamplight before bed. Does he ever take solace in the lowbrow or the casual? A film concerned with life’s little pleasures might benefit from a few namedrops that aren’t so conscientiously planted so as to bolster Wenders’s own bona fides as an aesthete. Faulkner’s writing doesn’t readily suggest fodder for chilling out after hours of cleaning up piss and shit—which we never see, as the scatological element of Hirayama’s job is inconvenient to Wenders’s naïve idealizing of blue-collar work.

Most infuriating of all is Wenders’s refusal to confront the gulf that exists between Hirayama’s interests and how he makes his money. There’s nothing wrong with being happy with humble work, but Wenders doesn’t earn his reverie. Humility often springs from facing and surviving darkness, whether it’s bitterness, regret, or profound catastrophe.

Nevertheless, if you can accept Perfect Days on its own rigged terms, it’s Wenders’s most involving film in some time. The notion of every life being wonderful is tempting as media opiates go, and several scenes do land. For instance, a moment in one of Hirayama’s favorite haunts, where a woman sings “The House of the Rising Sun,” manages to suggest in a matter of seconds her wellspring of longing. But these moments can’t escape the stifling sanctimoniousness of Perfect Days. No moment, no stray detail, disrupts the pervading class condescension that Wenders mistakes for empathy. For a slice-of-life film to work, there must be an illusion of randomness, and Wenders can’t escape his old, deliberate ways. Most of the film’s scenes feel planted, as if Wenders is introducing exhibits in a case.

At a certain juncture it becomes obvious that Perfect Days is an older man’s fantasy of returning to an analog world. So was Paterson and Jarmusch’s film before that one, Only Lovers Left Alive, though those are thornier works. Hirayama encounters younger people, whom Wenders draws broadly, and they continually express astonishment at his collection of American rock cassettes and shelves of literature. Quite a bit of the film is devoted to these sorts of mutual appreciations. Ultimately, Wenders’s longing to wind society’s clock back from a surveillance dystopia is more personal to him than Hirayama’s meditations over trees and commodes.

It’s possible to leave Perfect Days in disbelief at its sentimentality, yet still feel refreshed by its contemplative plunge into a world that’s an implicit fantasy of life as it was before social media annihilated the tactility of seeing people in person, buying things in stores, and owning movies and music as actual objects, rather than as data on a computer. The film reveals itself, beneath its evasions, to be riven with despair after all. If only Wenders could’ve faced it head on.