It cannot be said that Wim Wenders has, a priori, spoiled him with this role of an employee of the Tokyo public toilet. In Perfect Days, Koji Yakusho spends most of his time getting ready for work, driving his small van full of household accessories, and meticulously bricking the toilets around the city. Receiving this Saturday evening, at the age of 67, the acting prize of the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival, Koji Yakusho may have thought that the German director had finally offered him the role of his life.
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In his work blue, Koji Yakusho-Hirayama does his best. His face is filled with furtive smiles. The sweetness never leaves him. The sun playing through the sliding door of a high-tech toilet in Tokyo moves him. This quiet self-sacrifice even when his sister twists her nose in front of his work, this foolproof placidity even when the users of the hurried toilets spoil his work, make him eminently sympathetic. He is the most Zen character in the competition.
But Hirayama is also a loner who assumes himself. A follower of the routine life that he fills with tiny pleasures, a kind of Philippe Delerm who would have taken to haikus: photographing the light in the foliage, finding a forgotten author at a bookseller, slipping into the hot pool of public baths, watering his plantations with young trees or listening to cassettes in his car radio. Koji Yakusho has a long career in film. Mainly Japanese. From Imamura (The Eel, Palme d'Or 1997) to Kore-eda (The Third Murder) that he met at Cannes since the latter presented his latest film in competition (Monster). In Babel by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, he played a Japanese businessman who was adept at hunting.
Read alsoOur review of Perfect Days: the first flush and other tiny pleasures
Palme d'Or for Paris Texas in 1984, Wenders, whom some call "the revenant of the Croisette", returns successfully to Cannes after a wide detour by the documentary. By imagining this character offbeat in his time, who still uses a silver Olympus and a radiocassette, Wenders borrows like his Italian counterpart Nanni Moretti (Towards a radiant future, also in competition) the path of melancholy. He found in Koji Yakusho, an ideal actor, touching the festival-goers and especially the jury in a competition where the male roles were generally neither very strong nor very striking.
