Perfect Days: Is There Emptiness Beneath Beauty?

Perfect Days has risen to acclaim for its promise of tranquility in its aesthetics and plot, with filmgoers deeming it as a visual antidote to the chaos of modern life. Here, we follow the daily life of Hirayama, who cleans toilets across Tokyo, and listens to the likes of Van Morrison, Velvet Underground, Patti Smith and Nina Simone, and cares for his plants, and photographs trees during his lunch breaks, and frequents the same restaurant after a long day at work. His routine is bare, and simple enough for anyone to enter and pass by. Together, they evoke a sense of familiarity to you and I, because we can easily see ourselves going to work, eating and listening to music like Hirayama, opening up a collective understanding towards the ‘regularity’ of routine. Perhaps watching someone practice reverence for something seemingly common and almost missable forces - albeit, gently - a reflection about the way we live. 

The film continues to anchor its audience through its pace, as there is almost little to no dialogue and no premise of a plot. Instead, it relies on evoking a visceral way of seeing that is rooted not just in sight, but also in the body. We follow Hirayama through feeling (or very few would argue, the lack of it), as it fosters a universal language of understanding for the audience to enter into the film.Sam Holdenwrote that the appeal of Perfect Days stems from its ability to build an “analog world that flows into one another in a continuous, fluctuating medium of experience”; mimicking the naturalism of using analog technology. Experience is the greatest teacher and perhaps the only portal to expertise. Funnily enough, Hirayama is portrayed to be an advocate of analog, where his possessions centre around a rotation of a film camera, a set of cassettes and a collection of neatly shelved secondhand Japanese books. His intent in living this way isn’t explicitly communicated, but we can see a clear passion. The audience is pulled into these “analog” moments, and cannot help but feel nostalgic over a life that could be lived. Perhaps the film carries a critique against the instantaneity, the stripping of organicism, embedded in (our) digital lifestyle.

Besides the instrumentation of analog, the film’s pace is solidified through Hirayama’s breathwork, which establishes a visceral cue for his own attempts to practice mindfulness, and for the audience to be present alongside him. One can read this as a homage to Buddhism, as the film has been hailed as a “moving meditation” with several audiences referring to it as Zen, and evoking a “sense of now”. In Buddhist teachings, breathwork (Anapanasati) is the anchor of all life, and so everything is controlled by the pace of our breaths. Hirayama presents himself as a steady example of someone who stands in control of his life-and-his-breath, exhibited in the depth of breath — as he takes the wholeness of his life and its experiences. I found myself breathing alongside him, and participated in his exercise of retaining presence; to exhibit witness wholly into the film. In breathing alongside him, the film resonates as an affirmation towards living itself, as Thich Nhat Hanh affirms: “Every minute can be a holy, sacred minute. Where do you seek the spiritual? You seek the spiritual in every ordinary thing that you do everyday.” 

Here, we can say that the film has fulfilled its titular promise. From its premise to production, Wim Wenders and his crew construct a world of careful coherence, where nothing feels out of place. And yet, as the pace settles and the breathwork persists, I begin to sense an absence: the tranquility that once felt meditative slowly curdles into something hollow.

For Hirayama, a life of peace is one of distance, where challenges are fleeting, conflict is minimal and disturbances - an annoying coworker, an extra shift - are contained and resolved within the neat boundaries of routine. It was temporarily ‘ruptured’ through the presence of Hirayama’s niece, forcing him to loosen his carefully arranged solitude, compromising his routine for her accommodation. Ironically, it is precisely these moments where the film has felt most alive: in caring for her, and in speaking rather than retreating into silence. Hirayama had truly become “human”, as he was enlivened by affection, love and vulnerability. Yet, this vitality was only short-lived. When she leaves, the film restores its presupposed equilibrium, and we retreat into insulation rather than serenity. As I attempted to breathe alongside him, I found myself growing restless of Wenders’ neverland of calm.

Perhaps some will argue that this is precisely the point: to offer temporary relief against the stressors of everyday life. But, the stillness had felt too indulgent, too frictionless, almost indulgent in its insistence that escape is the sufficient response. Perfection here requires subtraction of humanity: a careful stripping of urgency, disorder, and contradiction.

In shaping such a world, Wim Wenders presents beauty as an orchestration of life into a neatly arranged sequence of “moments”. The film gestures towards an organic sensibility that is reminiscent of Wabi-Sabi, yet its imperfections are curated rather than lived. Crudely put, his strength lies in the aesthetic coherence, but that coherence reveals the limits of his positionality. What emerges is not a meditation on simplicity, but a romanticisation of Japan through the Western gaze. In this sense, Perfect Days presents a white man’s fantasy: an idolatry of Japan, and Japanese culture embodied through Hirayama’s ascetic calm. He is less a fully situated subject than a vessel for longing: a figure who desires for purity, escape, and simplicity comes to life. 

The aspiration of this film becomes exposed, as we are not invited to simply observe his life, but to desire it: to long for the stripped-down, quiet grace of Tokyo remains, and for a life refined in ritual and solitude. Hirayama stands before us as a figure who relinquishes in ignorance, remaining unknown, and unwilling to recognise the violences and inequalities structured in contemporary life. 

Perfect Days ultimately becomes a testimony towards romance as an aesthetic tool, and its ability to numb the senses from reality. In grounding himself so completely in his own rhythms, Hirayama also nullifies the harm and violence that surrounds him. Perhaps what we are presented with is the truth of Wim Wenders’ own politics: a deliberate instrumentalisation of romantice as a means of detachment from the realities that surround him. 

In the recent Berlin Film Festival, Wim Wenders says that filmmakers, like himself, should “stay out of politics” which affirms his own characterisation into this film’s premise. Film has always been political – not only in what it declares, but also what it chooses to withhold. And the deliberate choice of reverting to romanticisation is itself a political act, as Wenders invites an indulgment of the senses, and a recluse from any moral or political context. 

Now, the beauty that I had once revered had vanished before my eyes and all that remains is an empty vessel of art.