Wim Wenders in the land of the rising sun.
“Brief, dark shadow of a city tree, the light sound of water falling into a sad pool, the green of smooth grass – a public garden on the edge of dusk – in this moment you are the whole universe to me, because you entirely fill my every conscious feeling. I want nothing more from life than to feel it ebbing away into these unexpected evenings to the sound of other people’s children playing in gardens fenced in by the melancholy of the surrounding streets, and above, the high branches of the trees, vaulted by the ancient sky in which the stars are just beginning to reappear.”
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“Ugh, I need some kinda spiritual experience,” I said earlier this week, probably needing to touch grass. I’m not religious but when I get into these funks of disconnection it’s important to remind myself that a whole world exists off to the side from the death trip humans are on. Interdependent with us, sometimes even the product of our higher natures, but not us. Not the disaster of us.
Perfect Days, one of two new movies by the great Wim Wenders, brought me back to that. The face of Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) registers a broad spectrum of emotion at this modest but full life that’s a constellation of his days: pride in his work, excitement at shooting film photos of treetops and getting them developed, the satisfaction of clunking an old cassette into his utility van’s deck, and the occasional loneliness from his inability to relate or frustration from those taking advantage of him. He lives as a man who notices, absorbs, pulls meaning from everywhere — a risky state of affairs for a sensitive soul. I’ve been rereading Pessoa’s fragmentary, diaristic The Book of Disquiet, and typed his phrase “to analyze is to be foreign” into my Notes app. Pessoa, an observer himself, intended this as an admission of alienation from an ever-capitalizing society rather than, e.g., the “analysis is reactionary” crux of Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation.”
As Hirayama’s reactions unroll and evolve throughout Perfect Days, so did mine as a viewer. I came to the movie open but reserved, eventually realizing cinematographer Franz Lustig’s muted palettes and relative digital lustrelessness were not at all repudiating the fiery contrasts of Wenders’ late DP Robby Müller but were setting the narrative stage for a third act where an illuminated night river could gleam a toothy white and the Tokyo skyline could bloom with bokeh. And eventually grokking that the character’s boomer taste in music had more subtlety to the choices as well. Sure, over the years advertisers have stripped Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” and Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” for parts, creating a Frankensteined version of two complex, volatile, mouthy artists in which only positivity and warm fuzzies remain. Wenders rescues those songs from the perils of monocultural flattening and invites us to be enveloped by their salubrity again. And having a Japanese restaurant owner sing an impromptu reprise of “House of the Rising Sun” after we hear the Animals’ hit version — it calls back to Japan’s history as “the land of the rising sun” and Nippon’s imperial history as the sun’s origination point relative to China. (Japan was once known as “Wa,” a Chinese term believed to have meant “small,” “submissive,” “shameful.” Perfect Days‘ Hirayama might relate.)
A lovely movie and a satisfying bookend to the existentialist yearning of Wings of Desire, the contemporary-via-1989 Tokyo of Notebook on Cities and Clothes, the selective mutism of Paris, Texas that loosens the chokehold ennddlllesssss diaaalllooooggguuuee has on “talkies,” and Alice in the Cities‘ influence of youngsters as a necessary disruption of routine.
