Perfect Days

Perfect Days is structured as a week of near-identical days with tiny, significant variations. Wenders and co-writer Takuma Takasaki trust that repetition — rather than plot — is what makes the viewer notice change when it finally arrives.

The film's miraculous tonal register is that it never sentimentalizes Hirayama's job. The work is shown as actual, skilled, physical labor. The dignity is not announced; it is demonstrated shot by shot.

Yakusho has about twenty lines of dialogue. Most of the performance lives in how he looks at things — a sapling, a cassette tape, a stranger on a bench. It is one of the decade's great silent-register leads, and it earned him the Cannes prize with no contest.

The final four-minute close-up, set to Nina Simone's 'Feeling Good,' is the single most moving shot of 2023. Yakusho cycles through an entire autobiography of emotion on camera and refuses to name any of it.

The soundtrack — Lou Reed, Patti Smith, The Kinks, Van Morrison, Otis Redding — functions as memory infrastructure. Hirayama's cassettes are a personal library, not a needle-drop aesthetic.

Cinematographer Franz Lustig shoots on Academy-ratio 4:3 with muted, almost Ozu-restrained composition. The Shibuya toilets themselves — designed by architects including Shigeru Ban and Tadao Ando for The Tokyo Toilet project — become characters in their own right.

Pros: A career-summary performance from Yakusho; a final shot that belongs in any list of the decade's great endings; a film that trusts its audience entirely.

Cons: Deliberately low-plot — viewers expecting narrative drive will be frustrated; the 124-minute length is a commitment to the film's rhythm; best experienced without distractions.