By JOSÉ FERES SABINO*

Considerations on the film directed by Wim Wenders

1.

While planting a withered tree, a father tells his son that a long time ago, a monk who lived in an Orthodox monastery planted a barren tree on top of a mountain. The monk tells his pupil that he must water it every day until it comes to life. The young man accepts the task and every day, early in the morning, he fills a bucket, climbs the mountain and waters the withered tree.

He repeated this gesture for three years. When, one morning, the young man climbed the mountain, he found the tree full of new leaves. The father then repeated what he often tells himself: “If everyone did the same act every day, like a ritual, every day at exactly the same time, the world would change.”

This is one of the opening scenes of the film. The sacrifice (1986), by Andrei Tarkovsky. And I believe that in the film Perfect days (2023), by Wim Wenders, there is something of this ritual and this gesture present in both the character Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) and the director of the film.

Wim Wenders, in an interview with the newspaper The Guardian, stated that all his films deal with the question “how to live?”, and, in reacting to the journalist’s comment – ​​that Hirayama contrasts with the restless characters in the films Alice in the Cities (1974) and Paris, Texas (1984), Philip Winter and Travis Henderson respectively – answers that in these films the characters seek an answer to this question; in Perfect Days, however, Hirayama is not looking, as he already lives as he should.

Perhaps three gestures by Hirayama – a public toilet cleaner who carries out his work with great care – mark his way of life: looking up at the sky before leaving home, living life in step with the movement of nature and contemplating everything around him. Situated and observing the present moment, Hirayama is in permanent relationship with things and beings.

The character recalls the figure of the wise man established by the philosophies of antiquity: being open both to what the moment offers him and to the feeling that his existence is part of something greater than himself.

2.

Hirayama, who lives alone in a tiny apartment in Tokyo, has a life limited to essential consumption, necessary intimacy and the sharing of rituals (he always eats lunch at the same restaurant, takes a shower in public bathrooms, buys books at second-hand bookshops). His presence is present in everything he does. And don't think that Hirayama's attitude towards life is one of indifference. On the contrary, because he is not locked away in his interiority, he is not only immersed in the present and in tune with the whole, but he also carries with him the experience of life in common (of the common good).

When, for example, his niece, the daughter of his sister, a wealthy lady, runs away from home and looks for him, he welcomes her into his apartment, introduces her to his world, spends time with her, but “returns” the girl to her world when he tells his sister that her daughter is in his house. Hirayama is in emotional relationships with others, but he never loses his bearings in life.

During his workday, Hirayama always looks for a garden or square in the middle of the metropolis where he can have his midday meal.

Upon entering these spaces, he, while maintaining his attention on the present moment (he observes a beggar, exchanges glances with a girl, picks a plant sprout), also photographs, with an analog camera, the exact moment of the play of light and shadow that occurs when the leaves of the trees sway in the wind. The Japanese language calls this exact moment – ​​which only happens once – Komorebi.

Hirayama's dreams – which appear in black and white, like the photos he takes during the day – are experiences of Komorebi. (All of the film's dream sequences were conceived and filmed by Donata Wenders, the director's wife.)

In the documentary, tokyo ga (1985), a tribute to the Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu and a meditative exercise on cinema, Wim Wenders searches for the image of the human that appeared in the films of the master Ozu, an image that, with the arrival of modernity in Japan, began to disappear. On the outskirts of Tokyo, one can still see what Ozu's fixed camera had captured in his films. (Journalist José Geraldo Couto recalls that Hirayama is the name of the protagonist of Ozu's last film, from 1962, which, in Brazil, received the name Routine has its charm.)

Wim Wenders insists on looking for the man Ozu filmed – because he is the one who still gives a sense of reality to an image. In this, he distances himself from Werner Herzog, who, while passing through Japan, gives a testimony in the film tokyo ga, from the top of a tower from where you can see the city of Tokyo.

Says the director of Aguirre, the Wrath of the Gods (1972): It is no longer possible to capture a transparent image – an image suited to our civilization and to the deepest intimacy of man. To find it, one must dig like an archaeologist. However, the two filmmakers are bothered by the proliferation of unreal images, an imagery garbage that buries human vitality.

Not only does the proliferation of images bury vitality, but the Western civilizational pattern itself, which grows and produces compulsively, no longer fits within the Earth. We are children of a civilization of excess: an excess of objects, garbage, heat, pollution, chatter, unreality. Hirayama's life – which he chose to lead (we glimpse in the conversation with his sister that he comes from a very rich family) – presents in its simplicity and dignity a counterpoint to excess.

When seeing life blossom on the screen, perhaps the viewer might not open a crack within himself so that the question – what, in fact, does a human need to live? – enters his parched inner self and sheds a moving tear.

* Jose Feres Sabino He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of São Paulo (USP).

Reference

Perfect days (Perfect Days).
Japan, 2023, 123 minutes.
Director: Wim Wenders.
Screenplay: Takuma Takasaki, Wim Wenders.
Director of Photography: Franz Lustig.
Cast: Kōji Yakusho, Min Tanaka, Arisa Nakano, Tokio Emoto.

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