Wim Wenders
Perfect Days

The city is an individual, and its streets are its veins, along which the lives of millions move. These are lives of people who get up each morning, leave their homes, and embrace the world in a cycle that repeats over and over. Each with their own view of things, each following a personal path. Each with their own inner universe.
Each part of a small or large community, with a small or large role within it.

Even though the sense of all this is getting lost in the maze of change, and more lives flow in unconsciousness, in the futility given by the lack of awareness of living in a beautiful world taken for granted.

And many things have been lost, but not for everyone yet.

Hirayama carries on a ritual routine, where after each dawn he travels along one of Tokyo's veins to clean public toilets, fulfilling his task while contemplating every little marvel of being alive.

It's rare for this man to speak with anyone, but not to hide sadness, due to alienation, sourness, or asociality.
His extreme shyness/reserve is merely due to the awareness of belonging to a very different personal dimension from the contemporary world. Where the profound meaning of everything that was analog, simple, calm, as opposed to the frenzy of the digital and the quick consumption of human relations and even work relationships, is among those things that have already been lost in the fire. With those rare souls that he feels somehow akin or at least understanding, he opens up. As with his niece, and especially with the innkeeper's husband whom he looks at with an innocent and pure affectionate gaze.

Modern life is consumed without ever really having been lived, except perhaps realizing it just before it is taken away from you without warning.

Wim Wenders, aside from being perhaps the greatest admirer of Yasujiro Ozu's work - the ultimate poet of life's seasons and the end of traditions, with the advent of modernity - lists among his favorite films the immortal masterpiece by Kurosawa, Ikiru. To Live.
This film from '52 starts from the moment when a man, upon learning about his incurable illness, begins to live for the first time, for the little time he has. I imagine the character of the husband, mentioned above, as ready to savor the joy of small things before having to leave this earth.

In one last journey, perhaps, like it was for Nishi and his wife in Hana-bi, the untouchable peak of Takeshi Kitano's filmography.

With Perfect Days, Wim Wenders pays homage to the culture, cinema, the land of Ozu, Kurosawa, Kitano, Mizoguchi. The land that once belonged to Mishima, and which another great of Western cinema, like Paul Schrader, wanted to depict through his gaze on rituality, self-discipline, methodology. Order rather than chaos.

Because being able to wake up, looking out the window, and finally seeing your familiar world, knowing it’s still there with you, welcoming you, whether it's sunny or rainy, makes all the difference possible.
Because the sense of routine is also the sense of circularity and peace, the refuge, compared to everything that flows, changes, dissolves in the wind, in time and space. Compared to everything that passes.

Playing to chase and grasp the shadow of another is like playing to stop and block what by nature can no longer be stopped, as it is inevitable. You can step on the shadow for a second before it starts moving again, continuing on its path. Like the course of the seasons, like the past that gives way to the future.

Those shadows are ourselves. Here for a moment.

Perfect Days is the awareness of this, and the happiness of being alive in any case. The same as Paterson by Jim Jarmusch or Soul by Pete Docter, Pixar's most beautiful film.

Brad Pitt at the end of Ad Astra says something extremely significant.

"We are everything we have"

The only life we can live is here and now. Even though it is taken from us one breath at a time, like the present time.

And if you can spend it listening to a cassette tape, that sound unknown to those who are twenty today, it's beautiful. And if you can share a coffee, rubbing hands feeling the warmth of your skin, it's wonderful.
After all, Peter Falk in Wings of Desire, in his dialogue with Damiel, the angel that only he can see and perceive as a fellow being who hasn't yet given up wings and immortality, had already expressed everything. And that, besides being the most beautiful scene in all of Wenders' works, is among the most beautiful in the history of cinema.

The dialogues on perception, which Wenders has staged through his films, his photographs, his interviews, are not yet finished, and we hope they can continue for a long time.

In the awareness that everything flows, like the waterfalls in Happy Together by Wong Kar-wai. And that, even if we wish for everything to stay like this forever, "if nothing ever changed, it would be truly absurd.” It would be presumptuous to venture a judgment on merit, to assert if it is right or wrong. As Anton Chigurh would say, it just is.

But meanwhile:


It’s a new dawn
it’s a new day
it’s a new life for me and I’m feeling good