Dfter the pandemic, in light of his love for Japan, a Wim Wenders a series of commercials on the architecture of Tokyo’s public toilets was commissioned. During the process, however, he understands that he has enough material and ideas to make a fiction film. It was born like this Perfect Days – great success at the cinema broadcast this evening on Rai 3 at 9.20pm. The protagonist is the actor Kōji Yakusho, awarded Best Actor at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
Perfect Days on Rai 3: plot of the film broadcast on Friday 13 February
Hirayama is a sixty-year-old Japanese man who works as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Throughout the story, his work routine and hobbies are shown: taking care of plants, reading a book, taking photographs with an analogue camera.
In this rigorous scan, man has a series of unexpected encounters which gradually reveal something more about his past and his interiority. The visit of his niece, the arrival of the sister he hasn’t seen for a long timethe colleague Takashi who quits, a customer of the public toilets who hides some notes for him to find.
Mr. Hirayama intent on his evening reading. (Lucky Red)
Wim Wenders film review
Prominent exponent of New German cinema, Wenders made wanderings a narrative and productive constant in his cinema. Evident for example in several films made in the United States, including Paris, Texas. Returning to Japan almost forty years ago Tokyo-Gadocumentary dedicated to the master Yasujirō OzuWenders pays homage to the sober style, the low position of the camera and the never banal themes of ordinary life. Perfect tools for storytelling the zen approach of the protagonistdiametrically opposed to the frenetic one of the West.
Hirayama is sixty years old, he lives alone, speaks little and leads a quiet life, in which he takes pleasure in small things: a sauna, a frugal lunch in the parkthe meeting with strangers, remaining indifferent even to the indifference from the customers of public toilets. In the film, man’s advanced age and social condition are therefore not a source of melancholy or sadnessas well as the achievement of an inner peace that allows you to live everyday life intensely. Hirayama lives in his own world, analogue and at walking pace, but not detached from the rest of the world, who always welcomes with amazement and grace.
Hirayama helps a child find his mother. (Lucky Red)
The cast
Prominent interpreter of Japanese cinema for over thirty years, Kôji Yakusho has become a well-known face to the international public thanks to Perfect Days. In 1996 he was the protagonist of Shall We Dance? (role went to Richard Gere in the Hollywood remake); the following year of The eel by Shōhei Imamura, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.
Outside Japan, took part in Memoirs of a Geisha by Rob Marshall in 2005, a Babel by Alejandro González Iñárrituin 2006 and, in 2007, a Silk by François Girard, based on the novel by Alessandro Baricco. On the small screen, he got noticed for the Netflix series The three days after the endabout the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.
