You like me?
Did you understand the ending?
Why does Hirayama laugh and cry at the same time?
Questions pile up in the audience as the last scene stretches for more than a minute on the screen.
It is a close-up with the protagonist's face at the wheel of his old truck returning home after a long day of work.
The evening sun illuminates his teeth.
Sadness and happiness coincide in the same, fleeting moment
.
Nina Simone:
Feeling Good plays from the cassette player.
And?, my friend elbows me.
But there are movies that don't have quick answers.
And
Perfect Days
is one of them: you have to let it settle, like a river bed, so that the crystalline song can then flow between the stones.
What can be said about this man who is passionate about cleaning Tokyo's public toilets?
The film, filmed in the Japanese capital, is full of sensitivity and poetry.
Simplicity and depth.
It describes the days and nights of a lonely guy, whose job is to
pick up other people's dirt.
The routine begins at dawn, when he hears his neighbor passing the broom on the sidewalk.
He then gets up, brushes his teeth, waters the plants, puts on his blue romper and opens the front door
as if he was going out to drink the wind
.
He looks up at the sky and smiles.
How those who have
the intuition of being on the verge of something new smile.
Then he will get into his truck full of buckets and mops and tour bathrooms in squares and train stations where he will scrub toilets until they are spotless.
So much so that he invented a little mirror mounted on a long pole to inspect the bottom of the urinals.
No one but him will be able to see if there is a drop there.
Hirayama will see things that others don't, like the lineman who is always in the same park.
Because for him there will be no anonymous beings, nobodies.
Because not even he is.
The Oscar-nominated film could well be an
experiment in observation
.
As was
Biography of a Fly,
by Juan José Millás, that journalistic gem that followed the evolution of Catalina (the name that the Spanish writer gave to the insect) to tell her life cycle.
With a look as cinematic as that of Wim Wenders, the director of
Perfect Days.
A Japanese story, simple and profound at the same time.
MUBI Photos
“I imagined Hirayama as a
simple but happy
man (on Sundays he visits bookstores and record stores).
He lives in the present and takes pride in being useful to others.
“He is the kind of person who notices
how sunlight passes through the branches of a tree and who observes the small plants that grow at the foot of it
,” Wenders explained.
And you will have to believe him.
Because it's all that appears in the eyes of this Japanese man who now laughs and cries
among the lights and shadows
of the sunset, while listening to
I'm feeling good/I feel so good
.
In the audience some sing with Nina Simone and let their emotions fall - like sediments - into the depths of their souls.
Maybe we can separate good envy from bad and look at the sky with Hirayama's eyes.
A man who has nothing, but smiles when he wakes up every morning.
See also
See also
The working family in the mirror