Music in Movies – Feeling Good
The approaching 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo helped create a rather unusual art project: the construction of seventeen public restrooms by well-known architects and designers known as the The Tokyo Toilet. Forget velodromes and swimming pools. Public sanitation was where it was at.
German director Wim Wenders was asked to create a documentary about the project, but two things happened: COVID postponed the Olympics and during the delay Wenders thought a movie would be better. So for sixteen days, Wenders filmed a simple film about the quiet life of Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) in a bustling metropolis with a job that some would describe as menial. After all, here is the sales pitch:
“He is a sanitation engineer who cleans public restrooms. He likes to take pictures of trees during his lunch break and spends his free time reading literary novels, listening to classic rock on cassette tapes and tending to seedlings. Did we mention that he likes taking pictures of trees?”
Wenders started off his career with restless road movies like Alice in the Cities and Paris, Texas, but Perfect Days is about a person who knows where he is supposed to be and strives to live a simple, yet meaningful life. Still, there is conflict, whether covering for a lousy co-worker, finding a potential love-interest in the arms of another or housing his runaway niece. But through it all, Hirayama keeps his equilibrium by staying in the moment.
“Next time is next time,” is what he tells his niece when she tries to make future plans. “Now is now.”
Eventually, the niece goes back home and Hirayama is off to work, popping in a cassette to listen to Nina Simone.
Movies don’t normally play a whole song. They definitely don’t show a guy listening to the whole song while driving to work. They definitely don’t affix the camera right in front of him with one long take, the guy staring right at you, or are you staring at him?
That’s what it felt like. Like I was invading his space. It was only on future viewings that I saw the whole movie revisited in the shifting moods of Hirayama’s face, a face moving from happy to wistful to sad to frustrated to pangs of regret. Then a look determined to put it aside as the sun peaks and Simone sings, letting everyone know in a sleepy metropolis how she and Hirayama feel.
