Review: Perfect Days 

By Simon McCarthy

8/10 Stars

But first two films about cleaning toilets go head-to-head.

Japan: Perfect Days. vs Aussie: Kenny.

Name: Perfect days.  Year of release  2023                 

Director: Wim Wenders                                                  

Lead Actor:  Koji Yakusho  -   Hirayama                   

Also starring:  Tokio Emoto                                            

Awards:  Cannes  Film Festival  2023 Best Actor.  

Facets: Many                                                                 

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Name: Kenny.  Year of release  2006

Director:  Clayton Jacobson 

Lead Actor:  Shane Jacobson, Kenny

Also starring: Ron Jacobson

Awards:  AACTA Best Actor 2006.

Facets: Some

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Synopsis:

Hirayama is a good natured overworked public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. He gets little support from those around him and has major issues with his Father. He has come to the business of public sanitation in order to escape the demands, responsibilities and obligations of his privileged background.

Kenny is a good natured overworked portable toilet installer in Melbourne. He gets little support from those around him and has major issues with his Father. He has not come to the business of public sanitation in order to do a penance or avoid the world, he is trying to make a living.

Genre:

Kenny is a feel good Australian mockumentary. The subgenre is Comedy 

Perfect Days is a feel strange Japanese/German art house film. The subgenre is “Slow Cinema”

Comedic strength:

So Kenny is way funnier than Perfect Days. Everyone learns from a very early age that there are few things in life funnier than excrement.  But that only holds until you meet a comic genius like Shane Jacobson. The subtle humour built into almost every line of dialogue in Kenny is a joy to listen to. Perfect Days does have some incidentally funny scenes, even a moment of slapstick, but comes in second on this count overall. 

Romance:

Kenny hooks up with an air hostess on his way to a sanitary wares convention in Nashville. She finds him kind and amusing, and he cannot believe his luck. Incidentally, Kenny does meet some Japanese businessmen at the convention, but there is no evidence this leads to any ongoing dealings, and anyway this all happened many years before we meet Hirayama from Perfect Days.

Hirayama exchanges self conscious glances with a young woman in a park each lunchtime. She is silently perplexed by everything up to and including her own sandwich; they never speak. He possibly shows an interest in a bar owner who treats her five patrons to an unconventional rendering of the House of the Rising Sun. Her lyrics suggest an element of slavery in the song. The song plays twice in the movie, there may be some symbolism here with the Japanese national flag that depicts the rising sun, probably not… 

Production:

Perfect days was originally to be a short documentary film about a major Japanese architectural project called The Tokyo Toilet Project (see link below). However, Wenders saw the potential for a feature film, this was a good call, as the film has turned out to be his biggest box office earner ever.   Kenny was made on a very low budget, partially funded by the mobile toilet company that feature in the film; some of their staff also appeared. Both films were shot with hand-held cameras. Both were financial successes.

Conclusion:

Although the films have many similarities and are both in a way about class tourism (and yes, it is also you on the inside of the tour bus looking out) to continue with a direct side by side comparison is going to get strained. One final note before saying farewell to Kenny, both Kenny and Hirayama have at one stage a young relative working with them cleaning the toilets.

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                                                               Perfect Days.             8 /10 Stars

The story line of Perfect Days is a circular one; the scenes could just about happen in any order without affecting the narrative. The story gets bigger, not longer. It is all about the ordinary, the mundane, and repetition. The dreariness of Hirayama’s work is nothing new to the vast majority of the world’s workers, it’s a case of “same shit different day,"  perhaps seldom quite so literally true as it is for Hirayama.

 While watching Perfect Days, I thought of Oyama Shiro's remarkable book,  A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Labourer. By comparison, Hirayama’s life is pretty sweet, certainly if you put the excrement to one side. To maintain a grip on reality we must remind ourselves that we are only watching somebody pretend to occupy a low place in the social order. There is a difference.

We meet Hirayama’s estranged sister who arrives in a chauffeur driven car. “Is it true you are cleaning toilets now?" she asks, but what he hears is more like  “Is it true you are finally free of all societal and familial oppressions?” He answers with a look of triumphant defiance, “YES”.

The dim green glow that accompanies some of the indoor scenes is presumably a white balance or film speed artefact, and along with the rain, it helps to imbue a sense of dull but somehow sacred monotony. The 4:3 aspect ratio of the film allows for the capture of both the ceiling and the floor at the same time in the interior shots. Natural lighting was used throughout the film, and even the night scenes were shot from the shoulder; no tripods or other gizmos were used. Apparently, Tokyo never really gets that dark.

In a night scene under a bridge, Hirayama takes four cans of beer and a packet of cigarettes, we assume to get smashed? I’m thinking if Kenny were still with us we would be looking at the best part of a slab of beer before he got the wobbly boots on. Anyway, Hirayama sips a bit, coughs a lot, and then the ex-partner of the lady who runs the local bar shows up, bums a beer and a smoke, coughs a lot, and reveals he is dying of cancer. Hirayama appears uninterested in the man’s health problems and insists they play a game of stamping on each other's shadows. This appears to be part of a larger coping strategy that he uses to deal with stress, not that shadows themselves are actually all that therapeutic, even when stood on, but more the idea of just focusing on what’s right in front of you, right now. Isn’t this how animals perceive the world ? For them there is no future or past, just the now, and there is nothing more real, tangible, or consequential than now. 

The distinctive sounds of '70s and '80s pop music blare from Hirayama's van’s  cassette player as he drives from toilet to toilet under the shadow of Tokyo’s Sky Tree  (the tallest tower in the world). The songs act loosely as scene markers for the story, their variety contrasts with the repetitive nature of his work. Japanese culture is known for its appreciation of ritual; Hirayama follows many standard ones, like going to the bath house, and has also developed his own, like taking photographs of tree branches from the same spot, and keeping them ordered by date in boxes in a cupboard.

There is a scene in a music store where we discover that audio cassettes tapes of pop music from the '70s and '80s in good condition can be worth a lot of money. Why this might be the case is hard to fathom, perhaps younger listeners are intrigued by the physicality of the tape when compared to a purely digital medium. However, I predict this fascination will last right up to the first time a player attempts to eat a tape and refuses to let go.

Perfect Days is a fast paced example of Slow cinema."  Wikipedia says, “This genre of art cinema is characterised by a style that is minimalist, observational, and with little or no narrative, and which typically emphasises long takes. It is sometimes called contemplative cinema." An excellent short article on this style of filmmaking from the British Film Institute appears in the links below.

I highly recommend this film. Wim Wenders and Koji Yakusho are creative masters at the height of their powers, and in Perfect Days they have literally turned shit into gold in an act of true cinematic alchemy.

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