Wim Wenders' filmography shapes our lives Paris, Texas has Wings of longingtraverses its immensity To the end of the world. Today with The perfect days, the German director asserts concern for the common good in a style that is consciously reminiscent of the documentary. Interview in French with a brilliant filmmaker.
Every morning, Hirayama (the great Japanese actor Koji Yakusho, who won the Best Actor award at Cannes for his role) gets up, smiles and looks at the sky and gets ready before going to work. His job – invisible – is to clean Tokyo's toilets, sumptuous places of relaxation designed by award-winning architects. Shapes, colors and technological inventions (such as those with transparent windows that fog up when you enter) make these Tokyo toilets true works of art. The meticulous curator is Hirayama.
The German director Wim Wenders. AFP
The project was originally pitched to Wim Wenders as “a series of short documentaries about architects and these absolutely fabulous public toilets.” But as soon as he arrived in Tokyo, the filmmaker knew that the proposed format was not the right one. “I told myself that I felt something that was much bigger than a documentary about architects and their creations. I felt there was another opportunity, namely the sense of the common good that I feel very strongly in Japan.”
“We all emerged from the pandemic with the feeling that, back home in Europe, the common good was the great sacrifice. Two weeks after the end of the lockdown, the small park near my house in Berlin was destroyed, nothing was left. While I was in Tokyo, I saw a different attitude. The residents took back ownership of their city, their parks, their streets, their toilets. They celebrated, but it was so beautiful and with so much respect and care. I found it so moving that I said to myself that we have to make a film in which we see these toilets, but with a story in which we feel this different model of life.
Hirayama aka Koji Yakusho in “The Perfect Days”. Photo provided by Enttract Films
Wim Wenders therefore wrote the script together with the “great poet and writer” Takuma Takasaki and hired Koji Yakusho: “I asked for the greatest actor, I wasn’t modest,” he remembers with a laugh. “It has become a fiction. And this fiction is about a man who takes care of these toilets and cleans them. He is responsible for it, he is the caretaker – I don’t know the word in French – and it has become a story about beauty, happiness and a different sense of the common good than here in the West.”
“Simplicity is always the hardest thing. Like Hirayama, who lives a simple and humble life, we cannot make a film with the smallest possible means. We followed Koji Yakusho.
Shot in 16 days with a handheld camera like a documentary, “The Perfect Days” is decidedly optimistic – even if we see certain flaws in the character of Hirayama's young colleague and his friend.
Koji Yakusho and Arisa Nakano in The Perfect Days. Photo provided by Enttract Films
“A big inspiration for this film was the large number of young people I met in New York, in London, in Paris shortly after the pandemic and before filming The Perfect Days. These are young people who are taking part in a large, very real reductionist movement. They no longer want to have all of these material possessions and only want to own what fits in a suitcase. These are young people who celebrate minimalism and who are very clear, very optimistic and very confident. I really liked them and they became my model for the character Hirayama.”
“How can you be happier with less? The problem with young Westerners is that they have too much of everything and are not happy because they always feel like they are missing out on something. And Hirayama doesn't miss a thing. He only pursues what he loves and he lives in the moment.”
Perfect Days, nominated for an Academy Award for Best International Film, opens in Montreal on February 16 and in the rest of the province on February 23.