Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Perfect Days’ on Hulu, Wim Wenders’ Profound Rumination on Beautiful Toilets, and the Tender Soul Who Cleans Them

Perfect Days (now streaming on Hulu) originated just like all films do – as a loving ode to the world’s most beautiful toilets. The Tokyo Toilet is a sort of urban renewal-slash-public art project, where architects designed 17 public restrooms in the city’s Shibuya ward, opening them in 2020. Producers originally invited Wim Wenders to direct short films about these beautiful little structures, but he and co-screenwriter Takuma Takasaki were instead inspired to make a feature about a man who cleans the toilets, which become a metaphor for finding beauty no matter where you look – even if it’s just, y’know, a place to eliminate human waste. 

PERFECT DAYS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) is a minimalist in a maximalist world. He lives by himself in the heart of Tokyo in a humble apartment without a shower or a refrigerator. He’s a living-breathing anachronism who listens to cassettes and uses an old point-and-shoot camera that takes actual film and doesn’t use a cell phone until three-quarters into the film – and it’s a flip phone. His routine is methodical, but not obsessive, and I know that seems like splitting hairs, but his mannerisms are too soft, his nature too easygoing, to not note the difference. His rhythms are so ingrained, he doesn’t need an alarm – or he’s so sensitive, his alarm every morning may be the sounds of a neighbor woman lightly sweeping leaves from the sidewalk before dawn. She seems to have a methodical routine, too. I wonder what her life is like? Is it solitary and quiet and contemplative and ever-so-slightly melancholy like Hirayama’s? I wonder, I wonder.

Hirayama wakes every day and folds his mattress and places his pillow on top and folds his blanket and places it atop the pillow. He brushes his teeth, shaves with an electric razor, trims his mustache. He spritzes his plants with water and pulls on his jumpsuit with The Tokyo Toilet logo stitched on the back and walks out the door, pausing in the emerging light to look up to the sky. He smiles. He always pauses to look up and smile. He buys a canned coffee from a vending machine, gets in his little blue van stocked with janitorial supplies, picks out a cassette to listen to – will it be Van Morrison or Lou Reed or Patti Smith today? No, the Animals’ ‘House of the Rising Sun’ – and pops it in and starts the engine (he always pops the cassette in before starting the engine) and drives to work. He meticulously scrubs the bowls and urinals, pops off toilet lids and cleans the crevices with a toothbrush, presses the little button so the bidet emerges and he puts up his hand to block the spray of water and then cleans the cylinder. He takes pride in his work.

More than ten minutes of the movie go by until somebody speaks, and that’s Hirayama’s young coworker Takashi (Tokio Emoto). “Hirayama, take it easy. It’s going to get dirty again anyway,” he says. When someone walks in to use the toilet, Hirayama exits, stands just outside the door and patiently waits for the person to finish, then resumes cleaning. He hears a boy crying for his mother inside a stall, so he takes the boy’s hand and walks him into the park and when they find his worried mother, she doesn’t say a word Hirayama but quickly pulls out a wipe and cleans the boy’s hand. Hirayama lunches in the same spot in the park every day, pulling out his little camera and taking a shot of the sun-dappled trees above. He goes home after work and takes off his jumpsuit, bicycles to the public bath and cleans up. He then visits the underground shopping mall where the friendly man who runs a restaurant recognizes Hirayama from his nightly visits. Hirayama retires for the night, reading a paperback book until he tires, then dreams in impressionistic black-and-white, often with images of the things he saw that day. The next morning begins just like the previous. Does Hirayama’s life ever change? Of course it does. Change is inevitable. It will happen whether you want it to or not. We’ll see some of those unplanned variations in his routine, and he just flows with them. He just flows with them.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Here’s a reminder to revisit Wenders’ Paris, Texas. I enjoyed a similar response to Celine Sciamma’s Past Lives. And Wenders has said his minimalist approach to the film is reminiscent of Ozu (see: Tokyo Story). 

Performance Worth Watching: Yakusho won best actor at Cannes in 2023, and there’s no debating the reticent power of his performance. The supporting cast – Emoto, Nakana, Yamada – shouldn’t be overlooked for inspiring the film’s strongest comedic moments, either. 

Memorable Dialogue: When Hirayama speaks, which is hardly ever, we need to listen: “Next time is next time,” he says. “Now is now.”

Sex and Skin: Old man butts in the public bath.

Our Take: Perfect Days is a portrait-of-an-eccentric comedy about a man with perhaps the kindest eyes you’ll ever see. Comedy, yes. There are moments that inevitably tug the melancholy strings of the heart, as we’d expect from a movie about a man who lives alone and inevitably feels some of the complications of loneliness, and those moments feel simple and profound. But the exquisitely timed laughs feel goliath in the context of such a quiet film about a man who speaks so few words during its two hours, the pedants among us might take it upon themselves to count them. 

The near-silence Wenders cultivates prompts questions to worm themselves into our consciousness: What’s Hirayama doing? What’s he thinking? What happens when something disrupts his routine? Will the entire movie be like this? Would it be so daring as to never truly deviate from the “normal” days of his life? He encounters some of the same people on a daily basis, but do they truly know him? Does he ever speak about himself? Does he have any friends? What constitutes a “friend” anyway? Maybe Takashi is one, and he asks Hirayama, “Aren’t you ever lonely?”, although the kid, loud and slightly dopey (but nevertheless endearing) as he might be, is smart enough to not expect an answer. What does Hirayama do on his day off? Well, he wears his watch, stops at the temple, visits the laundromat, develops his film, sorts his photos, buys a new book and goes to a bar-restaurant for drinks and dinner, where the proprietor, known affectionately to regulars as “Mama” (Sayuri Ishikawa), asks, “Why can’t things just stay the same?”

Some things stay the same. The Tokyo Skytree is always there, but the light doesn’t always hit it the same, and it’s illuminated with neon at night – slight variations on a theme, like blossoms at various angles on a tree. The narrative takes a similar tack on Hirayama’s routine: Takashi brings his romantic interest, Aya (Aoi Yamada), into the story; Hirayama finds a scrap of paper tucked behind a restroom mirror with the beginning of a tic-tac-toe game on it; the odd-duck homeless man he sees every day isn’t always in the same place in the park; one day, he comes home to find his niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) waiting for him. He doesn’t listen to the same music every day, either, and the soundtrack is a facet of Hirayama’s character, a poetic conduit for his emotional state, which is often happy, but melancholy.

Hirayama is part of the fabric of urban Tokyo life, and his environment – the trees, the toilets – help define his character. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and a beautiful one. Although the narrative hints at his past, I don’t think his story is necessarily tragic, but it is subtly philosophical and moving in the sweetest way. Watching Hirayama interact with the world in all its beauty is delightful. Delightful. 

Our Call: Perfect Days is simply wonderful. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.