A poem about simple life amid crowds.
Angel Jaramillo Torres
“The present is the source of all presences,” said Octavio Paz in one of his many felicitous phrases. In some interpretations, his poetry could be understood as a call to the immanence of the now. The present is where freedom is actualized.
That may be the meaning of the phrase that Hirayama, the hero of the film Perfect Days, murmurs to his niece on a long afternoon in Tokyo. The phrase in Japanese means, more or less, the future is the future and the now is the now. It sounds better in Japanese. ( 未来は未来であり、現在は現在である) It is a phrase with deep existential resonances and also expresses the secret to understanding the film’s protagonist.
With this, his latest film, Wim Wenders could be considered the first German-born Japanese film director.
Hirayama’s phrase could certainly have been uttered by one of the angels who spy on the thoughts of Berliners, still divided by the wall of ignominy, in Wenders’ film Der Himmel über Berlin.
We know that Wenders teamed up with Austrian writer Peter Handke to make several films together, such as the magnificent The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty. There is something of Handke’s lyricism and artistic vision in Perfect Days.
Yakusho Koji (the actor who plays Hirayama) knows the value of silence. And Perfect Days is a film about silence and its uses to achieve joy. It is also a film about art and its sudden appearance in a large metropolis. Hirayama is, of course, a public toilet cleaner—a job located at the bottom of the human hierarchy, one might say—who, however, can use his free time to take pictures of leaves cutting through the sky, to read books by exquisite authors, or to listen to great music on old cassette tapes.
Although he lives in Tokyo, Hirayama is a consumer of American rock music, which he listens to with the fervor of someone celebrating a Dionysian ritual in his van on his way to his prosaic job. The soundtrack of his life, we might be tempted to say, is the song of the same name by Lou Reed, which combines a piano in a minor key with bursts of strings that, if they don’t lift your spirits, you might as well be dead. Wenders knows how to combine the apotheosis of this song with the monumental view of the city of Tokyo. At moments like this, cinema is an undeserved gift.
“You’ll reap what you sow,” Reed’s song ends.
According to Wenders himself, Hirayama is a man who had reached the pinnacle of the corporate world and decided to leave everything behind to live apart in the midst of the crowds. He chose the most humble job so he could devote himself to a simple life, like an Eastern Francis of Assisi.
The final scene makes us happy because we know that Hirayama will have many perfect days ahead of him. Wim Wenders has created another great poem in Japanese style that calls us to reflect, joy, and contemplate in the here and now. The present is the source of all presence.
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