Festival Circuit 2023

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IFF Boston Fall Focus schedule

Tickets go on sale today

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But the topic to which Wenders devoted the most time was Kōji Yakusho, the star of the director’s latest narrative feature, Perfect Days. And appropriately enough, as Yakusho deservedly earned the Best Actor prize at Cannes for an often nearly silent and wonderfully restrained but powerfully expressive performance as Hirayama, a solitary man who devotes himself to his work cleaning public toilets in Tokyo and the modest pleasures he builds into the routines and patterns of everyday life. Through small gestures and a reflexive kindness, Yakusho builds a lived-in richness and depth for a character for whom the film’s script (by Wenders and Takuma Takasaki) gracefully avoids specifying motivations or history except by the most delicate of implications.

I’m not a Wenders completist, but this is the best narrative feature of his that I’ve seen since his 1980s heyday, a lovely and humane examination of the role of public spaces in everyday life, the joys of a stubbornly analogue life in a digital world, and the value of a life lived deliberately, no matter what the scale. Wenders’ aforementioned passion for mid-century American music plays a key role narratively and emotionally, as do his established interests in photography and architecture.

Easy to recommend, warmly pleasurable to experience, and difficult to shake afterward.

I’m more charitable towards Wenders post-80s output than many, but I found this was underwhelming if still good overall. I hate to be that guy scaling a film’s worth through comparison, but Paterson did it better. The movies are very similar - though Wenders’ poetic ambitions feel forced when we’re living through Yakusho’s isolated observances, whereas Jarmusch imbued a careful lyricism into his film that evoked earned notes or grace.

Perhaps this was the point - though if so, it seems needlessly coy about it - but the film breaks away from its rote detail-appreciation and shines brightest during its few scenes where Yakusho engages in interpersonal exchanges - with intimates or strangers, doesn’t matter. They make him uncomfortable but he acclimated each time and offers parts of his ‘self’ to bring the most inspired moments of transcendent beauty to the picture. I didn’t think the film really had an interest in saying anything about the importance of connection and participation, which is fine I guess, but plays strange when Wenders seems to almost envy Yakusho‘s solitary lifestyle in a vacuum, and then also exhibit how much more he can squeeze out of it when he steps outside that safe comfort zone to engage in novel ways from his routine.

I dunno, the film establishes opportunities to explore that conflict, if only peripherally and abstractly, but I don’t think it really makes a lot of choices. Wenders plays things safe like his protagonist, seemingly without the awareness of the irony that he and the principal character are engaging in avoidance of the very thing the film is about: accessing the sublime. That’s often dangerous, though I do appreciate how this leans into the Possible that exists all around us, the eco-spiritual version of a Higher Power. It’s uneven but when it hits, it’s quite affecting.

[yoloswegmaster]

Greta Gerwig is next year's Cannes Jury President