Perfect Days                       5 stars

What would you think if I said one of the best movies I have seen this year is about a man who cleans toilets for a living? You might not believe it but that was what I found when I saw Perfect Days, the new movie by German filmmaker, Wim Wenders, starring Japanese movie star Koji Yakusho. This 68-year-old actor has been a steady performer in Japanese cinema for decades and is known to western audiences from Shall We Dance? And Tampopo. He is able to display his emotions and the contentment of his character by his facial expressions while hardly saying a word. His plays Hirayama, an older man who lives in a small apartment, gets up at dawn every day and sets out to travel the city of Tokyo and clean the many public toilets as an employee of The Tokyo Toilet. We follow him as he goes about his routine, preparing for the day and meticulously cleaning each toilet in the bustling city. Along the way we find out his varied interests of raising Bansai trees, photographing trees in the park using an old film camera, listening to 60’s and 70’s popular music on cassette and reading essays and novels, like William Faulkner. Through his work routine he is respectful of those he meets at the restrooms and seems completely content. As the film goes on, he has some encounters with regulars at a bar and the restaurants and public bath that he frequents. There is a rather flaky young co-worker he shares a shift with who is more interested in impressing a girl than with the job. Koji handles him with ease and only has to say a few words to deal with the co-worker’s begging for money. Eventually, we do learn a bit more about his past when a long absent niece and his sister come to pay him an unexpected visit. We know that something must have happened in his family years ago, but he found his own way of dealing with the issues of life. Through his meetings with those he knows well and his encounters with strangers, he puts them at ease and gives them the feeling that he can be trusted. And he does it all while remaining satisfied with his situation in life and listening to the likes of The Rolling Stones, Otis Reading, Lou Reed and Nina Simone. The writer-director, Wenders came up with the idea of this story while visiting Tokyo and doing a documentary on the modern public toilets that Japan offers. They really are quite a technological marvel compared to what we are used to. Wenders has successfully given us a positive picture of those public service workers who quietly go about their business of making life easier for the rest of us and doing it with a smile. Perfect Days is nominated for the Best International Film Academy Award.