Every day, joy and terror: 'Perfect Days' (2023)

Wim Wenders' new film admits contentment and fear in meditation, then defines existence by them.

Perfect Days (2023), dir. Wim Wenders, Japan/Germany

I left the theater after Perfect Days feeling much more disarmed and confused about living than I did when I had entered, partly because I had had, up to that point, a perfect day. It snowed all morning and I watched The Girls (which I always do on the year’s first snow day), then went to my favorite ramen restaurant with my friends for lunch, and then my coworker tagged along to the movies. In the past few weeks I have embraced these joys, especially the shared ones,¹ as the foundations for a meaningful life.

I had expected Perfect Days to meditate on life’s small joys, especially because of its title and its light-hearted trailer. In a short clip, director Wim Wenders and leading actor Kōji Yakusho introduce the film and discuss how the concept of komorebi—the shadows left by light passing through leaves, or more general passing beauty—inspired it. The film would affirm the same principle we see in works of slow cinema or YouTube slow living videos: that if we pay closer attention and shed expectation, we will find beauty in everyday things. The film does affirm this principle, but also complicates it. The beauty we find in Perfect Days coexists with a kind of terror; the film redefines mundane life as a key to simple joy, a drudgery that we need to defy, and an endless chasm at the same time.

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Hirayama (Yakusho) wakes up every morning, without an alarm, as if defibrillating himself back to life. His watery eyes blow open and he inhales sharply, waking from a dream and fired back into common existence. His gentle smile and light movements test these waking scenes (and the rest of the film) for patience; he brushes his teeth, mists the plants, and folds his futon. While watching Hirayama go about his routine I thought often about Jeanne Dielman (1975), the ultimate “routine film.” Where that film holds its attention on mundane tasks to oppress us with the slowness of passing time, Perfect Days maintains a sense of air, cutting after we have taken in the moment more than usual but before it begins to settle too heavily on us. When Hirayama walks out his front door, he always looks up at the sky, exhales, and smiles gently again; his morning routine becomes one big breath.

My mom tells me that every day before she gets in her car for the early shift, she looks up at the stars, considers them, and thanks the day. Perfect Days suggests this kind of daily gratitude in Hirayama’s morning routine, as well as in his time at work. He cleans the public bathrooms in Shibuya’s parks; we watch his arms stretch and contract while he wipes down mirrors and we see him delicately fold new rolls of toilet paper into little triangles. I clean the bathroom at work and so does the coworker who joined me; when we saw him fold the toilet paper, we smiled at each other, and I felt thankful to share that silly experience² with an old man on the other side of the world. Hirayama smiles when he finds an unfinished tic-tac-toe game on a napkin folded into a gap in the wall, as he does when he teaches a foreign visitor how to lock the bathroom door and she laughs with wonder. At work we have table lamps that emit three different temperatures of light and can dim; people don’t know how to dim them, but when I show them, they always make the same sound: a rising “Ohhh!”

The film embraces these mundane pleasures earnestly because they are beautiful and they do keep us going. We see examples of komorebi through translucent bathroom walls and on metal ceilings; the same images appear in black-and-white in Hirayama’s dreams, digesting and remaking the concrete world into another, mystical plane. Like Jeanne Dielman, though, Hirayama seems to tire of his routine, going to bed more abruptly, losing interest in his books, and sleeping poorly. When his niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) arrives, he finds pleasure in daily life again—she helps him clean bathrooms and they take pictures of trees and ride bikes together, all things he once did alone—and he cries when she leaves. The disruption in his solitary day-to-day brings renewed interest. Some days I go to work and love listening to people gossip or talk about something boring like real estate over dinner; other days I dread strangers and their conversations, and I end up just looking out the window.

On the worst days, though, I question the purpose of it all, and Perfect Days surprised me by doing the same. At the end of the film, Hirayama drives to work listening to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” and the camera holds on his face, glowing in sunrise. He smiles his little smile like always, then winces, then smiles again, then starts to cry, then contorts and smiles again. He looks tortured! The way people look when they confess a terrible feeling and have to turn away to compose themselves. I cannot fit Hirayama’s feelings into the system of mundane joys and mundane boredom anymore, and I feel as though he has lost the calmness that both of these experiences induce. Everyday life becomes a source of terror that wears a mask of contentment, a suffering through hypnotism that asks, “Can I really live like this forever? Warm myself with small joys and diversions, then come back?”

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I think this terror tightens around us all constantly and without warning. I ask myself how to live properly and without regret, but I can’t find the answer. Will I die without solving the riddle, will I spoil my one shot at it? I see how Hirayama tries to hold joy and fear on his face at the same time; he does it, but no one can live in a state like that! The tension of failing to figure out how to live and being forced to live anyway becomes the parent of human striving. I will always try to live as best I can, but I will never know if I succeeded because the tension is irreconcilable. In Poor Things (2023) Bella Baxter says, “I should like to be rid of my questing self,” but to rid herself of the questing she would have to rid herself of her self entirely.

In Perfect Days, the mundane pulls out of us these contradictions in the quest for living well. It demands that we see everyday life as, at once, a subtle and beautiful poem, a bore that we take pleasure from escaping, and a void that opens up a fear of death in unfulfillment. It is like the ambivalence we find, far from the mundane, in love: love fills us with a warm and often confusing grace, but foresees suffering after the loved one’s death; we cry when we love because we are happy and because we know we will eventually have to mourn. Is this just the human condition, existence pulling us between emotions we can’t settle into one pure feeling? Is it perfect?

I have been reading a collection of Georges Bataille’s essays in preparation for a conference paper I am giving in April. In one of the essays,³ he suggests an image of a solar system constantly turning over itself, moved by the movements of people and animals and, likewise, causing them to move too. His philosophy involves troubling the hierarchy of “elevated” things (perfection, piety, romantic symbolism) and “base” things (death, filth) so that we privilege neither: in the collection’s introduction Allan Stoekl calls this a “headless allegory.” The solar system constantly turns, just as elevated concepts fall, becoming base, and base concepts rise, becoming elevated, and over again, like a big spinning wheel. The wheel moves, but not upward; Bataille argues that abolishing this hierarchy does not make us better (more elevated), but only more in touch with real experience. In the same way, the solar system rotates, but only in view of another rotation: the arms of the galaxy, which house the solar system. All these turnings fold back on themselves and no one makes any progress; we experience the rotation.

At first I cried after Perfect Days because I felt lonely; I cuddled with my cat and felt his future death color the moment with loss. Other times I cuddle him and feel comfort, and of course sometimes we don’t cuddle at all. This is all there is: love, pain, and boredom that effortlessly repeats itself, turning an inconsistent but irreducible existence.

See other films from: 2020s | Japan | Germany

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Cross Dissolve is my blog about film, how it makes me feel, and how I see it reappear in my life—how movies and living dissolve into one another. Please subscribe if you enjoyed today’s essay. Thank you for reading!

Love, Tyler

1. A few months ago, when I was still very much in the midst of a sad and anxious period, I asked my friend Georgia how she found meaning in her life. She told me the answer was always simple: the meaning of life is spending time with your loved ones and being good to them. Anything else we do—read, watch, or create—can only teach us how to be a better friend.

2. My favorite silly experience in the film occurs at the bath house, where an old man goes to sit up from his plastic stool and it sticks to his naked butt, then falls to floor with a little *pok*.

3. “The Solar Anus,” in Visions of Excess.