Perfect Days (2023), directed by Wim Wenders.
Professional toilet cleaner Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) listens to his collection of classic cassette tapes while driving in his van to work and in his meticulously clean home on a small ghetto blaster. His feckless young co-worker Takashi (Tokio Emoto) takes him to a record store (Tokyo’s Flash Disc Ranch) to get a valuation on some of his tapes, including Lou Reed’s Transformer which the record store clerk describes as rare. Hiragana refuses to sell, and instead gives Akashi some cash so he can impress a woman. Earlier, Takashi had introduced Hirayama to his girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada), who borrows Hirayama’s cassette of Patti Smith’s Horses after she hears the track “Redondo Beach.” This music, mostly meticulously-curated English-language classic rock from the 1960s and 70s, and Hirayama’s use of outdated, mostly analog tech, is central to the themes of Perfect Days, a film that fetishizes and nostalgizes certain outmoded aspects of Japanese working class life and celebrates a zen-like approach to living simply, seemingly outside of history, presented without comment or curiosity, although sometimes contrasted with images of industrial ugliness and social anomie and alienation. It’s a beautiful film, filled with many moving scenes and images, paired perfectly with some of my favourite music that actually had me crying like a little baby at key moments.
No comments:
Post a Comment