that points to the prize for the best edition of the festival. “Shooting a movie in Tokyo without thinking about Ozu is impossible,” Wenders acknowledged at a press conference, who assured that the Japanese filmmaker is his “spiritual teacher” and has tried to continue with Perfect Days the analysis of the evolution of Japanese society that the filmmaker did so well tales from tokyodied 60 years ago.
with echoes of the master yasuziro ozuthe German Wim Wenders presented this Friday in the Cannes competition Perfect Daysa little gem about a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo, played by koji yakusho, which aims for the award for the best edition of the festival. “Shooting a movie in Tokyo without thinking about Ozu is impossible,” Wenders acknowledged at a press conference, who assured that the Japanese filmmaker is his “spiritual teacher” and has tried to continue with Perfect Days the analysis of the evolution of Japanese society that the filmmaker did so well tales from tokyodied 60 years ago.
The German also acknowledged that his new work, with which he competes for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is “very close to the idea of angels” that centered one of his most famous works, the sky over berlin (“Wings of Desire”, 1987), for which he won the best director award at this festival. “My angels have completely disappeared from the sky of Berlin,” said Wenders, but in Perfect Days there is an angel, who is the protagonist, “who very few people can see.”
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Yakusho masterfully interprets Hirayama, a calm and polite man who cleans the perfect public toilets that are scattered everywhere in Tokyo, with very little dialogue. He buys used books and lives in a house where he doesn’t even have a toilet, but he is happy in his simple and perfectly organized daily life. The camera follows Hirayama from waking up to the sound of street sweepers, going about his painstaking job cleaning those public toilets, his lunch break in a park under a tree he photographs every day, and his few, mute interactions with the characters he plays. surround you.
An “enigmatic” script that does not give many explanations about the history of the protagonist, as Yakusho explained. “You just had to be on the plate Wim Wenders and feel the place where Hirayama lives, his problems, with that I have had a pretty accurate idea of what he feels because everything was very well set”.
Yakusho also received some written notes from Wenders with information that helped him develop his character when he didn’t know which direction to take. “I don’t know if I’ve gotten close enough to the character, but I really wanted to be this person, who has no material interest, who just wants to read the books he likes and go to bed every day with the idea that he’s had a good time. day and a full life”, added an actor who worked in Babel (2006) from Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu.
A character “that rests entirely on this actor, who is one of my favorite actors,” said Wenders, who added that Yakusho “has such humility, it touched my soul.” There was no other option for this role since the script was written with him in mind, as explained by the director, who decided to shoot this film after receiving a commission to make a short documentary about the public toilets scattered everywhere in Tokyo, which he decided to turn it into a fiction feature film but with documentary elements.
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The script was written in two weeks and the shooting in just three. “It was all ‘fast and furious,'” said Wenders playing with the title of the famous saga fast & furious. And although in the film there are barely a few hints of the privileged past that the character must have had, Wenders assured that he reflected a lot on Hirayama’s story, but he did not want to reveal it because he wanted to keep the simplicity of life that he shows in the film. “If there were more people like Hirayama in the world, the world would be a better place to live,” Yakusho reflected.
A film in which the director has tried to show a vision of Tokyo that was not that of a foreigner because he remembers the criticism he received Paris, Texas -Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1984- because many Americans did not appreciate the European point of view. Although the music is almost 100 percent Western, especially from the 1970s, by artists like The Kinks, Van Morrison, Otis Redding, Patti Smith or the “Perfect Day”, of Lou Reedwhich gives the film its title, which are heard on the protagonist’s old cassettes during his car trips and which perfectly accompany the narration.
“What this character does, what is perceived by the public, is what justifies this music,” Wenders said.
Source: Efe
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