Perfect Days (2023)
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Perfect Days Movie Review
Perfect Days is a 2023 Japanese drama film directed by Wim Wenders and starring Koji Yakusho in the main role. It’s a charming, but overrated film.
Hirayama works as a cleaner in Tokyo’s public toilets and seems content with a simple life. Outside his highly structured routine, he indulges his passion for music and books. He loves trees, and takes photos of them. I am not the biggest fan of Wim Wenders, but I did find this project interesting from the start as it’s pretty much a Japanese production directed by a German filmmaker, one that is very much Japanese in its slice-of-life storytelling approach, which fits the director’s style like a glove.
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And there is a lot to appreciate here for sure. The main performance from Koji Yakusho is among the better of the year. He is excellent in a very emotive, but mostly silent role. The main character is consistently engaging and actually more mysterious than most protagonists as we never fully meet him, but we still get a great glimpse into his life and the ones that he meets along the way during the short time frame of the movie.
Tender and detailed, Perfect Days is also very leisurely in its pace, which won’t be everybody’s cup of tea. While I appreciated how well the movie was shot, edited and acted, I did wish for a stronger storyline overall as the film lacked thematic resonance. There is a bit of exploration about the lives of undiscovered artists, but for the most part the movie was too ordinary for better and for worse.
There is a lot of parallel that can be drawn between this film and Kaurismaki’s ‘Fallen Leaves’. As was the case with that Finnish drama, I found Perfect Days to eventually be too uneventful and too meandering for it to be truly effective. I am a fan of slice-of-life storytelling, but this movie did not have enough of truly charming or memorable sequences that stayed with me after seeing it. It’s too casual and ordinary even for this type of film.
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Perfect Days is a Japanese drama directed by Wim Wenders that is very slice-of-life in its storytelling approach for better and for worse. While I appreciated how well the movie was shot, edited and acted, I also found it to be too slow and nowhere near as engaging as it should have been. There is a lot of warmth and charm to this film, but not nearly enough truly memorable sequences in it to make a bigger impact.
My Rating – 3.5
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