Perfect Days

Cinephile deep dive

The take

Wim Wenders directs. Franz Lustig behind the camera. Toni Froschhammer cuts. Profitable at the box office. Produced in Germany, Japan. Dialogue in English, Japanese.

Trivia

Things worth knowing

• 1Released 3 years ago.
• 2Dialogue crosses 2 languages: English, Japanese.
• 3International production across 2 countries: Germany, Japan.
• 4Directed by Wim Wenders, shot by Franz Lustig. Note their partnership — DPs and directors often return to each other across a career.
• 5Editor Toni Froschhammer shaped the rhythm. On an edit-heavy film, the editor does more to control your pulse than the director.
• 6Koji Yakusho and Tokio Emoto and Arisa Nakano carry the top of the cast.
• 7Marketing tagline: "In a world of fleeting moments, find the beauty that lasts.".
• 8IMDB entry: tt27503384 — still the authoritative cross-reference for credits and trivia.
• 9Classified under 15 themes, including "tree", "routine", "slice of life", "janitor".

The technical file

Cinematography

Franz Lustig

Editing

Toni Froschhammer

Production design

Towako Kuwajima

Costume design

Daisuke Iga

Makeup / hair

Katsuhiko Yuhmi

VFX supervisor

Kalle Max Hofmann

Sound

Matthias Lempert

Runtime

124 min · 2h 4m

Aspect ratio (typical)

1.37:1 (Academy)

Status

Released

Budget

$14,000,000

Box office

$24,094,016

Return

172% of budget

Original language

JA

Certification (US)

PG

IMDB

Perfect Days (2023) ↗

Also by

Wim Wenders

• 
  Willie Nelson at the Teatro

  1998 · ★ 10.0
• 
  Paris, Texas

  1984 · ★ 8.1
• 
  The Salt of the Earth

  2014 · ★ 8.1
• 
  Wings of Desire

  1987 · ★ 7.8
• 
  Alice in the Cities

  1974 · ★ 7.7
• 
  Two or Three Things I Know about Edward Hopper

  2020 · ★ 7.7

Stills · wallpapers

Selected frames

Full-resolution frames — open one to save it as a wallpaper.

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Trailers & featurettes

Watch the pieces

• 

  ▶
  Official Clip - Next Time Is Next Time. Now Is Now. [Subtitled]

  Clip · Official
• 

  ▶
  Interview with Wim Wenders

  Featurette · Official
• 

  ▶
  PERFECT DAYS Writer/Director/Producer Wim Wenders in Conversation

  Featurette · Official
• 

  ▶
  Wim Wenders on How "Ozu's Spirit Looms Large" Over PERFECT DAYS

  Featurette
• 

  ▶
  Official International Trailer [Subtitled]

  Trailer · Official
• 

  ▶
  Official US Trailer [Subtitled]

  Trailer · Official

Community reviews

What people are saying

• BornKnight2024-03-04
  ★ 10/10

  Coproduction between Japan and Germany, directed by the german director Wim Wenders (Texas Paris, Wings of Desire among others) and written by him and Takuma Takashi. It won the Cannes Film Festival 2023 for Best Actor and Ecumenical Jury and it is nominated for Academy Best Foreign Movie (my favorite for this category). It tells some days at the life of a public bathroom cleaner at Tokyo, interpreted by Koji Yakusho Hirayama, as Hirayama, his daily routine and 4 events in between his usual days. It also shows how some people treat those invisible workers even in a modern civilized country as Japan. Hirayama have a simple, but happy life as he is and what his does with the maximum commitment - it is a marvelou movie about contemplation and what simple things and events can bring of happiness in the life, if you allow it. The cinematography is by Franz Lustig (Anselm), and it is beautiful in using the available light and daily variations, mostly in shots with the protagonist. With a slow minimalistic story focused on this philosophy and camera work also directed to the architecture of public bathrooms, it may not be a movie for everyone. My score for it is 9,6 out of 10,0 / A+.

  Read full review ↓
• CinemaSerf2024-03-06
  ★ 7/10

  Now I don't now about where you live, but in my town you are lucky to find a public toilet at all, let alone one with designer fittings and miracle blinds! Luckily, Tokyo has a dedicated and meticulous cleaner in "Hirayama" (Koji Yakusho) whose routine gets him from bed, via the coffee machine, to his rounds, the bath house, then his book and again to bed. Helped, occasionally but not too reliably, by the younger "Takashi" (Tokio Emoto) his joy when travelling from site to site is to listen to old cassettes from the likes of the Doors and Van Morrison. He is an outwardly rather humourless man, and he likes his daily pattern, so imagine his surprise when he returns home one evening to discover his niece. "Niko" (Arisa Nakano) has absconded from home and decided to come stay with him for a few days. With his pal at work having a new girlfriend to impress and now him a teenage niece to accommodate, his life faces a turmoil and we have to watch (and hope) as he tries to get through it. Who knows? Maybe it will help bring him out of his self-imposed shell? Might we find out what caused that introspection in the first place? There's quite a lot of repetition here, but as each day goes by Wim Wenders introduces us to a little more. More about the city, more about the characters and maybe just a little too much about multi-purpose bleach. Yakusho is perfect for his part and he engagingly delivers a characterful performance as a man who prefers not to speak and the whole drama evolves, gently, to not so much a conclusion as another day that may or may not be different from the previous ones.

  Read full review ↓
• Brent Marchant2024-03-19
  ★ 4/10

  Films that feel like they're "reaching" in their attempts to make a statement can result in a frustrating watch, as is very much the case with the latest from acclaimed writer-director Wim Wenders. This character study about the life of a middle-aged public toilet cleaner in Tokyo (Koji Yakusho) follows him through his virtually unchanging daily routine of working, reading and taking nearly identical photos of trees. Even though there are minor differences in the events of his day-to-day life, much of his schedule is relentlessly the same, a comfortable yet mundane pattern that's cinematically repeated endlessly (and one can imagine what that does for holding viewer interest). He seems to purposely keep his life simple to avoid irritating complications, but that appears to be more of a way to stave off loneliness than to provide reassuring measures of certainty and predictability. He also appears to have undergone a painful (though largely unexamined) past that he's trying to escape, even though he clings to many elements that are rooted in that historical time frame (he listens to cassette tapes from the 1970s-80s, takes photos with a film camera, uses a flip phone and has little awareness about the internet). This lifestyle is presented as the source of some kind of supposedly profound wisdom, yet the insights that emerge from it are, quite frankly, innately simplistic ("the next time is the next time" and "now is now" - truly deep principles, to be sure). As a consequence, all of this makes for a rather tedious watch, one filled with story threads that go largely unexplored and, ultimately, unresolved. To its credit, the film features some fine cinematography and an excellent soundtrack, and it grows progressively more engaging the further one gets into the story (when a story actually begins to develop out of a largely flatlined narrative). But, despite these assets, much of the picture's opening half is riddled with extraneous material that could have readily been pruned. In fact, the removal of that superfluous content could have easily reduced this work down to a more manageable extended short without losing anything, a change that would have yielded a more worthwhile viewing option. I'm a longtime fan of Wenders' work, but this offering just doesn't measure up to his past releases. It's also somewhat baffling how this production has garnered as much attention as it has, such as its selection as Japan's entry in the 2023 Academy Awards' international film category, for which it garnered an Oscar nomination (amazingly beating out the far superior Japanese film "Monster" ("Kaibutsu")), as well as Yakusho's best actor award at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. However, no matter how earnestly a filmmaker may strive to get his or her message across, sometimes it just doesn't work, as is the case here, and that, unfortunately, is far from perfect.

  Read full review ↓

Production companies

Who made it

• MA

  Master Mind

  JP

• WE

  Wenders Images

  DE

Key crew

• Dialogue EditorAlexander Buck
• Sound Re-Recording MixerMatthias Lempert
• Foley ArtistCarsten Richter
• Sound Effects EditorMarkus Stemler
• Visual Effects SupervisorKalle Max Hofmann
• Co-ProducerReiko Kunieda
• Co-ProducerYasushi Okuwa
• ProducerTakuma Takasaki
• Co-ProducerKeiko Tominaga
• ProducerWim Wenders
• Co-ProducerKota Yabana
• ProducerKoji Yanai
• First Assistant DirectorTakuma Hayashi
• Second Assistant DirectorTakamasa Araki
• Foley EditorKuen-Il Song
• Foley MixerHanse Warns
• Foley MixerDaniel Weis
• GafferJun Tanaka
• Executive ProducerKoji Yakusho
• Line ProducerYusuke Kobayashi
• Casting DirectorMasunobu Motokawa
• Location ManagerKo Takahashi
• Post Production SupervisorDominik Bollen
• VFX SupervisorKalle Max Hofmann

Themes & keywords

What it's about, really

• tree
• routine
• slice of life
• janitor
• working class
• tokyo, japan
• character study
• uncle niece relationship
• audio cassette
• solitude
• mystical quest
• human nature
• playful
• lighthearted
• beauty of life

Release history · US

When it landed

• Premiere2023-09-01· Telluride Film Festival
• Premiere2023-10-11· New York Film Festival
• Premiere2023-10-25· Philadelphia Film Festival
• Premiere2023-10-28· AFI Fest
• Theatrical (limited)2023-11-10PG· New York City, New York
• Theatrical (limited)2024-02-07PG· New York City, New York / Los Angeles, California
• Digital2024-03-05PG
• Physical2024-07-16PG· 4K UHD /Blu-ray

Also known as

International titles

• 我的完美日常TW
• Dias PerfeitosPT
• Täiuslikud päevadEE
• 完美的日子CN
• Прекрасные дниRU