A little over 60 years ago the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu He completed his latest masterpiece. She did it shortly before she died at precisely the age of 60. He was born on December 12, 1903 and would die on the same day in 1963. The protagonist of ‘The taste of sake‘ (this was his farewell to cinema) was the widower Shubei Hirayama. In 1985, a year after the Palme d’Or for ‘Paris, Texas‘ (who has just turned 40, by the way), Wim Wenders filmed ‘Tokio-Ga’a documentary that was also a tribute and even a prayer dedicated, in effect, to Ozu. ‘Perfect days‘, the film that the German is now releasing, takes place in Tokyo and tells the story of a guy named Hirayama. He had to pass.
The film wants to be a reflection on the accidents of everyday life in strictly analogical terms. That is, when things, in the director’s opinion, not only happened but also weighed. The relationship with the ideology of the Japanese director is between obvious and clamorous. The film is expressed in identical terms. We will not say copy or imitation, but almost. With enthusiasm and without a trace of guilt, yes. The idea is to transcribe the daily life of a public toilet cleaner in the Japanese capital. Our hero subjects his day to a strict ritual that includes sleeping, waking up, watering the plants, going to work, going to the restaurant, bathing, reading, listening to music, taking photos of the leaves on the trees… Everything runs in an uninterrupted succession of the same thing, without drama, without anything that invites anything other than the calm caress of life. And so on until one day something happens (we won’t say what) and the fracture of everyday life gives a new meaning, deeper and much more painful, to everything that came before.
Those described in the previous paragraph are the three phases that Paul Schrader identified in the transcendental cinema of Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer, and that Wenders readjusts to his own ideology. Without additions, without the slightest hint of surprise, but with an enthusiastic, almost heated rigor. The director says that what motivated him to make the film was, on the one hand, the architectural perfection, as well as originality, of Tokyo’s public baths and, on the other, the care and respect that all Tokyoites show towards the common good. And indeed, the film stops, surprised, at every detail of a life so ordered on the outside and, we have arrived, broken on the inside.
The result is an exercise in cinema as refined as it is precise. And illuminated. It is true that, like much of Wenders’ latest films (always sick to a somewhat toxic degree with his own cinephilia), everything ‘Perfect days‘ is offered to the viewer who is excessively self-conscious, with each shot so calculated, measured and even x-rayed, that the supposed vindication of the everyday ends up very close, at times, to the most pompous Eucharist. In any case, this return of the director to himself, to his strictest one, is appreciated.wenderismo‘.
Be that as it may, what remains is a film that becomes great in its willingness to disappear; that grows as it fades; that hurts in each of its celebrations; that vindicates the value of time in the edgeless routine of a day completely alien to time. Wenders has made a film that gives us the best of his cinema while proposing an exercise in cinema as transparent as it is intense; as timely and evident as, in his own way, revolutionary. 60 years are nothing and Ozu is still perfect.