Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days finds beauty in the bowels of a public toilet

Open this photo in gallery:

The new Wim Wenders film Perfect Days, the most delicate, transcendent meditation on how to live that you will ever see, began with an invitation to film public toilets.

To be fair, they’re beautiful toilets, set in Tokyo’s Shibuya district, designed by 16 master architects. There’s a white cement swoop by Sou Fujimoto, and cubes of transparent tinted glass that magically frost over when the doors lock by Shigeru Ban. Wenders was busy shooting Anselm, his recent documentary about the artist Anselm Kiefer, but he flew to Japan to have a look.

“I loved these places, but I felt a documentary about them would be lifeless,” Wenders, 78, said in an interview during this past September’s Toronto International Film Festival. He looked achingly hip in small blue oval glasses, black sneakers and black drop-crotch pants; he toyed with the tiniest soul patch as he spoke in the gentlest, German-accented voice.

“Places are so much better kept in fiction than in documentary. If I’d made a documentary on Berlin before the Wall fell instead of shooting Wings of Desire, nobody would know it anymore. But 1987 Berlin is so well preserved in this outrageous fiction of guardian angels.”

So he pitched a new idea to Takuma Takasaki, the writer/producer who’d invited him to Tokyo: a fiction film about a caretaker of the toilets – who represents the Japanese spirit of the common good – named Hirayama, after the main character in Tokyo Story, directed by Yasujiro Ozu, one of Wenders’s heroes. Takasaki loved it; he flew to Germany so they could bang out the script together.

They didn’t have much time. To play Hirayama, Wenders wanted only one actor: the acclaimed Koji Yakusho, 68, whom he’d admired since Shall We Dance (1996). “He has the most incredible, kind eyes,” Wenders says. But the sole opening in Yakusho’s schedule was three weeks that October.

“So we wrote while I edited Anselm, and did all the preparations long-distance. I was on endless night Zooms with Japan.” They did a week of preproduction – unbeknownst to Wenders, Yakusho had done his own preparation, actually cleaning public toilets – then shot for a mere 15 days, on location with hand-held cameras.

“But limitation is a beautiful thing in movies,” Wenders says. “Most filmmakers suffer from having too much stuff. A lot of movies would prosper from being forced to reduce.”

Open this photo in gallery:

Perfect Days’ story itself is gorgeously simple. Hirayama wakes in his tiny apartment, folds his futon, shaves, buys coffee from a vending machine and selects a cassette tape to play in his truck, from the likes of Patti Smith, Nina Simone and Lou Reed. He methodically cleans the toilets. He eats a modest lunch in a public park, where he uses an old camera to take one or two photographs of komorebi – sunlight slanting through treetops, “the light of the universe,” Wenders says, “coming just to you.” He washes up in a public bathhouse and eats dinner at a noodle bar. In bed, he reads a $1 paperback, then turns out his light.

He repeats this schedule throughout the film, made new each day by subtle variations: encounters with his younger, scattered co-worker and the co-worker’s much cooler girlfriend; an unexpected visit from his niece; a surprise meeting with his sister, from whom we intuit the barest of hints about Hirayama’s former self. Gradually we realize that his modest existence is a meditation – he has exactly what he needs, and nothing he doesn’t – and we are lifted up, weeping, into the sunlight.

“I don’t know if I could have made this as a younger man,” Wenders says. “If you are truly living in the present, routine each day becomes a new thing, the most exciting thing.” Hirayama’s stillness is especially attractive to the young people who come into his orbit, who yearn for his authenticity, his analog ways.

The link between Hirayama and Wenders is that battered camera – because what is directing, after all, but capturing on film moments that are otherwise fleeting? It’s why Wenders has made so many documentaries about artists, including the painters Kiefer and Edward Hopper, the choreographer Pina Bausch and the Cuban musicians of The Buena Vista Social Club.

“I’m interested in how people see the world, how their emotions and eyes connect to their hearts or stomachs or wherever sits that feeling for what is good, and what is worth living for,” Wenders says. “It’s so beautiful that every person has a different way to see, and each of us is a universe in itself.”

Before he became a filmmaker, Wenders delved into medicine, philosophy, painting and engraving. “I couldn’t make up my mind,” he says. “I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a painter – my major influence on how to make movies is not other movies, but paintings. I wanted so much to make music, but I sold my saxophone in order to buy a used 60-millimetre camera. I realized I had to make a choice, I couldn’t do it all. Then I realized there is one profession where everything I loved was rolled into one, and you could be so open to everything, if you can manage to remain open.”

Though it doesn’t appear in Perfect Days, Wenders did write a two-page backstory for Hirayama. A privileged businessman with no respect for anything, he wakes after a drunken binge in a crummy hotel, and sees “the spectacle of sunshine on the wall in front of him,” Wenders says. “He realizes he’s the only person who sees this particular beauty. He understands that it would be so good to live in this feeling, and that would need to be a simple life. If you can do it, it’s so beautiful to live really in the now and not be concerned with tomorrow or what you own and how not to lose it. Hirayama has nothing to lose.”

I ask Wenders whether he could live that way. “I’ve started,” he replies. “When my wife and I came back from the shoot” – the photographer Donata Wenders; she made the sunlight sequences – “we gave away half our stuff. And now our apartment is almost empty.”

“Having less is so much better,” he continues. “As is being less distracted, being focused on fewer things. Most people, me included, are overwhelmed by all the stuff we’re supposed to read, see, own. Hirayama is not overwhelmed. He doesn’t need everything, and doesn’t want everything. His mind is much less cluttered, so he can see things. His reduction is a great charm, and it’s also the great power of the film.” Wenders smiles the tiniest smile, perfect in its minimalism. “Reduction is bliss.”

Special to The Globe and Mail

Film Review

Perfect Days

Directed by Wim Wenders

Written by Takuma Takasaki and Wim Wenders

Starring Koji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto and Arisa Nakano

Classification PG; 123 minutes

Opens at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto Feb. 9, expanding to other cities Feb. 16

Critic’s Pick

Komorebi is the Japanese word for the play of the sun through leaves, presenting an ephemeral spectacle in the sky or on a wall or floor. The thin shafts of light are said to re-energize and foster hope, but the ephemerality is the point – only you are seeing it, and only for an instant. Komorebi lies at the heart of Perfect Days, Wim Wenders’s perfect new film. Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) lives a near-monkish existence as a cleaner of the sculptural, architect-designed toilets in Shibuya, Tokyo. At lunch, he snaps a single photo of light in the trees with his ancient camera. But as his days unspool – always the same, yet always varied with new encounters, along with the most delicate hints that once he lived in a very different way – we realize that his mortality is a meditation. All of us, all existence, is komorebi. Hirayama is just wise enough to know it. I humbly suggest that this simplest of films may well change your life. J.S.