Perfect Days in Tokyo

 

Watched this tonight on MUBI. It's a lovely meditative film following the life of a toilet cleaner who likes routines, and noticing... and trees...

His routine keeps getting interrupted by various events.

There's plenty of little vignettes of the city... and a sense of lots of lives intersecting briefly... and other relationships built by repetition.

Very much a quotidian story and a personal psychogeography of Tokyo based around toilets, an underground noodle bar, and the laundrette... and a weekly exchange of film and photographs.

This review nails it:

“Next time is next time, now is now.”

Throughout Perfect Days entire two hour runtime, we stay together with our protagonist Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, as he lives his life of quiet, lovely solitude, one moment at a time. There are no flashbacks, no exposition dumps, no cutaways to another time or place. We never leave Hirayama’s side, and Hirayama himself never strays from being truly present in every single moment.


There are some spoilers in this review by Mark Kermode


This is linked to the Japanese idea of komorebi: a Japanese word that describes sunlight shining through the leaves of trees, creating overlapping layers of light and dark...

Recommended.

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