Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this cleaner from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscar Quest continues! We do our best to see how many freshly nominated works we can catch before ABC’s big, indulgent Academy Awards ceremony ends the viewing season. As is often the case, candidates in Best International Feature endure the slowest rollout of any category due to the complexities of overseas finances and/or struggles to get Stateside studios to pay attention to them and give them turns at our box offices, especially cities outside NYC and L.A.

So far in the BIF competition we’ve caught Spain’s Society of the Snow set in South America, the U.K.’s The Zone of Interest set in Nazi Germany, and Germany’s The Teachers’ Lounge, whose protagonist is from Poland and whose director is of Turkish descent. Our next nominee for your Oscar consideration is Japan’s Perfect Days, from German director Wim Wenders. Thus the mixing-and-matching of nationalities among creators and works continues, apropos of its main character’s aesthetic tastes.

Koji Yakusho (Memoirs of a Geisha, Babel) is Hirayama, a diligent employee of The Tokyo Toilet. Each workday morning in his cubic bachelor pad, he undergoes the same precise procedures of hygiene and plant care. He suits up, gathers his arsenal, and zips around the city in his company van. He cleans a variety of public restrooms that in no way resemble America’s infected, infested, grimy, grungy, claustrophobic, intimidating, brutalist assembly-line death-holes. Tokyo’s own will never resemble our worst-case scenarios as long as Hirayama is on the job.

Each and every facility has its own unique architectural grandeur to it — some whimsical, some serene, some technologically upgraded, some so eye-catching that they’d make fantastic selfie backdrops. Hirayama and his story are fictional, but the bathrooms are real. Wenders doesn’t clarify whether the examples seen and cleaned here are uncommon luxuries or indicative of Japan’s impeccable standards for common-area commodes. He also doesn’t test Hirayama’s mettle or their real-life owners’ boundaries by depicting any of them trashed by drunks or sufferers of severe GI distress.

Hirayama is polite and patient toward restroom users who come and go while he’s working. He’s congenial yet taciturn, speaking only when necessary, and sometimes not even then. He has a separate yet firm regimen whenever he’s not scrubbing and freshening — lunch at a peacefully tree-lined park alongside the same set of strangers, bicycling to dinner at his favorite joints where everybody knows his name, browsing a used bookstore, errands at the same places every week, and so on.

His career is the core of his life without necessarily defining it. He lives in the present but prefers the past, and not just through the narrow gateway of his flip-phone. His bedtime reads include William Faulkner and Patricia Highsmith. Later on a recommendation he samples Japanese poet/novelist Aya Kōda. For drive-time companionship he listens to a cassette collection that’s some years older than mine and larger than today’s worldwide average of zero cassettes per household. He’s a fan of Lou Reed, Van Morrison, Patti Smith, and other early-’70s staples along the edge of the mainstream path. I’ve not yet seen Wenders’ other works, but I used to own the Until the End of the World soundtrack on cassette. I’m confident Hirayama’s predilections track with his own.

Alas, innocent Hirayama’s insular yet perfectly content world is irrevocably shattered when…wait, no, that’s where a thousand other films would go. Once we’ve settled into his quotidian comfort-groove, we see him gently tested by interruptions. A millennial coworker named Takashi (Tokio Emoto, who was in a 2021 Japanese remake of Cube) with zero work ethic begs him to sell his tapes, which could fetch ludicrous prices among trendy retro music fans. His niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) pays a visit out of the blue and decides she’s staying over for a few days without asking. Car trouble, that irritating demon I’ve known all too well, rears its entropic head. A stumble into one couple’s embrace awkwardly weirds him out. Will he face each surprise with grace and poise? Or will one of them damage his calm and send him over the edge, screaming at his capitalist overlords to clean their own frickin’ toilets?

More often than not, nothing damages his calm, nor Wenders’ serenity. If you’ve ever seen Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story (Anne and I just watched it a few weeks ago), Perfect Days is charmingly akin in its elevated, metropolitan establishing shots, in Hirayama’s tranquility, and in the precisely layered staging of his humble abode. It’s all confined within the same old-fashioned aspect ratio of the time, a vintage vantage in a 70mm-IMAX world, but can convey emotion and action just as efficiently today in the right artist’s hands. Occasional handheld cameras add some verité jittering that diverges from the legacy of Ozu’s fixed gaze — a concession to modernity, not unlike Hirayama’s minimal personal tech.

He rarely allows himself a raised eyebrow or untoward exuberance. When he does react, it’s only when it really counts – say, at coworker-induced stress, or during a brief bout of family drama that hints at whatever secrets he closely guards or simply never dwells upon. Rather, he lives and thrives in the simplicity of the ever-pleasant now. His happiness is in watching someone else’s newfound joy in discovering music for themselves that he’s loved for years. It’s in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe with a mystery opponent. It’s in sidewalk horseplay with a terminally ill stranger. It’s in the black-and-white images from his dreams, which serve as untitled, unnumbered chapter headings between his days. It’s in the towering trees everywhere he likes to be. It’s in the old-fashioned satisfaction of a job well done.

And Our Hero’s happiness is in the closing moments, when the camera fixates without cuts as he drives into the sunset, listening to one last tune on tape. If the viewer has keyed into his wavelength, they too can ride along with him feeling the singer’s spirits rise, fall, and rise again. Tomorrow is another day, another song, another day to find joy in dutifully making the rounds.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: Min Tanaka (47 Ronin, The Great War of Archimedes) is an even more silent homeless man who keeps crossing Hirayama’s path and strikes poses like a mime imitating a bonsai, his preferred expression of happiness. Inuko Inuyama (Pokemon‘s OG Japanese voice of Meowth) pops in twice as the kindly bookstore owner.

How about those end credits? There’s no scene after the Perfect Days end credits per se, but before fading to black, the scroll leads to one last black-and-white dream image of leaves fluttering in the breeze above our heads on a bright day. Over this parting shot, Wenders shares the word komorebi, along with its definition. I didn’t write down his exact verbiage, but it refers to sunlight filtered through treetops and its interplay with the shadowy undersides, whether in a forest canopy or a modest copse in a city park. English doesn’t have an analog that’s succinct or poetic. (“Treetop-rays”? “Chlorophylluminescence”?)

While the text rolls along to a instrumental piano cover of “House of the Rising Sun”, other tidbits include Wenders thanking his own leading man (how often are directors so openly grateful?) and the names of all the toilet designers. When all’s done, viewers intrigued by Hirayama the curator can visit Neon’s official website for the film for a sort of Works Cited page with the soundtrack’s complete set list, same as in those credits, and the books he’s shown reading, some of which you might find at a used bookstore or your local library. (Well, maybe not Kōda.)