Download and Watch Now: Perfect Days (2024)

Short Review:

The peripatetic German-born director Wim Wenders, now 78, has drawn nearly as much inspiration from Japan over his career as he has the U.S. Two of his 1980s documentaries, “Tokyo-ga” and “Notebook on Cities and Clothes,” are set there, as is a section of his 1991 epic elegy for life on earth, “Until the End of the World.” Certain facets of Asian philosophy suggest Japan as a place in which one might seek serenity, or live out ideas of serenity, and for Wenders the implacable camera style of Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu has often been a model. 

For this late film, “Perfect Days,” Wenders depicts the orderly, ascetic, but culturally rich life of an older Tokyo resident who works in sanitation. Venerable Japanese actor Koji Yakusho (“Shall We Dance?”) plays Hirayama, who cleans high-end public toilets in the fashionable Shibuya district of Tokyo. A trim man with salt and pepper hair and a meek manner under which one sees a powerful charisma that’s been put under a willed bushel, he gets up every morning in his modest apartment and drives a van into town, playing his exceptionally curated cassette collection on the car stereo. Watch Movie.