AlreadyTimed on MaGbyKillerSev7en after his visit to Cannes last year,Perfect Daysreturns to the front of the stage thanks to its DVD and Blu-ray springBlaq Out. The opportunity to look again at this great work of the past year and perhaps give you the desire to see it again!
Cabinets of curiosity
Hirayama (Koji Yakusho, well known actor of Japanese cinema) likes in his well-ordered life, alternating long readings in his apartment, his passion for music and art in general, and his job as a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. Yet, encounters will force him to reconnect with his past...
It all starts forWim Wenders(German director ofParis, TexasorWings of DesireWith an order from the municipality of Tokyo. The goal? Making a documentary about the famousJapanese toilets in Shibuya district, created by renowned artists and symbols – they say – of the hospitality of the Japanese archipelago.
If the aim of this project for its sponsors was, one can easily imagine, to create a prestigious advertising spot, directed by no one other than Wim Wenders, the German director is not content with this. It transforms the initial command into a fiction of more than two hours. But the project can scare more than one! Between a filmmaker's overhanging vision of the simple joys of a toilet cleaner and his strange quasi-public birth,Perfect Dayshad trouble negotiating his slippery turns. Yet Wenders manages to draw one of the most beautiful films of the past year.
Daily choreography
OpeningPerfect DaysCondenses in thirty seconds all the essence of Wim Wenders' 25th feature film. Three plans, framed more and more broadly, detailing Hirayama's awakening (Koji Yakushohas decided not to steal its Cannoese interpretation price... A face awakening without the brutal resounding of an awakening, a dim light filled with mysterious violacious reflections and this body moved by a thousand times repeated choreography of the daily: the fold of futon, the storage of the room, the almost religious opening of a book... The minimal architectural aspect of this piece is reflected in a recount of the amputated plan of music and engulfed in its four-thirds format. Anyway,Perfect DaysThe entire image of this brief opening reveals: contemplative, a-spectacular, millimetred.
Far from delivering us a condescending bourgeois fable praising the simple and happy life of its protagonist, Wenders explores with his ordinary hero the display of his existential turpitudes, the same ones he tried to probe with his protagonists wandering through the vast deserts ofParis, TexasFor example. If the answer then was the unbridled walk in the horizontal immensity of his neo-western, his character is now stuck. Locked in the sprawl of a city that seems absurd. Urban circulation supplants the desert linearity of his 1984 film. And in the face of this restricted movement, this forbidden march, this narrow escape, remains only the law of habit that governs the life of Hirayama.
Hirayama and Jeanne
In itself, there are parallels to fire withJeanne Dielmanin this theme of alienation obliterated by submission to the daily train. If Wenders offers us a much less extreme (and more soothing) experience than that ofChantal Akerman, their two heroes – Hirayama and Jeanne – find themselves in this same modern and urban subjugation to the habit of not losing foot.
Hirayama does not, however, become one of those men who died inside and who populate the stories of alienation. Once the door of his modest home is closed in his back, he clings to a handful of material goods that seem to assure him an anchor (and a response to the existential drifts described above). His old tapes that he pummels day after day, his books that he constantly flicks, his plants that he takes religious care of.
In a scene flirting with humor, Hirayama piled up on her work bus with her colleague and girlfriend, throws an interlocked look at the young woman's smartphone. The flow of this index against the screen of the phone is as intriguing as it is frightening.
This modernity the terrace. And his voluntary downgrading (the passage of his sister visibly financially comfortable in his home bears witness to this) thanks to his work which places him at the bottom of the social scale allows him to escape the constant flows of this city life. Hiramaya has been erased – as it may be seen, not – it disappears when users enter the toilets, it does not speak, it sevanouses in the depths of a city as if to be better forgotten. He doesn't fight, he retires.
AndPerfect DaysThis will only be the case: annoyed by an externality that has become mad, but anchored in a quest for happiness – which is apparently so simple to reach – that will guide the whole story. The Hiramaya revolt is sweet, calm, soothing, rocked by the rhythms of the Velvet Underground and Patti Smith.
In short, Wim Wenders manages withPerfect Daysto thwart all that one might have feared from such a film (glorification of servile work, overwhelming bourgeois gaze, social film greyer than life...) and to transform his command documentary into a magnificent work of fiction perfectly in line with his filmography. A full-blown feature film, which it is advisable to (re)discover on physical media thanks toBlaq Out... With a supplement, an interview cut into six chapters: « Around a tea with Wim Wenders » (67 min).
Data sheet
Blu-ray Region B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 123 min
Release Date: 04 June 2024
Video format: 1080p/24 – 1.33
Soundtrack: Japanese and French DTS-HD MA 5.1
SubtitlesFrench
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