Listen to the street sweeper. Thank them for gently blowing out your dream, floating you back into waking life, like falling leaves. Look up and feel the crack of dawn softly pierce your eyes. Smell the air of the streets, still clean and unused. Surround yourself in the materiality of the world.

These are the transient moments Wim Wenders directs his audience towards in his latest feature Perfect Days (2024). Originally commissioned by the Japanese government as a documentary about public toilets in Tokyo (which are breathtaking, and not in a bad way), upon visiting the city Wenders decided to make a feature film instead.

Kōji Yakusho (Best Actor award at Cannes 2023) plays Hirayama, who takes us around the city in his toilet cleaning van listening to Lou Reed cassettes. Despite Hirayama’s humble occupation, he seems to lead a kind of Marxist idealism, spending the majority of his day listening to the trees sway in the wind, reading books, taking photographs and frequenting restaurants and spas where he is well liked. Out of context, you’d have to excuse the impertinence of his sister as to why he cleans public toilets. By contrast she gets around Tokyo in a chauffeur-driven luxury SUV.

Through Hirayama’s eyes, sacrificing her independence to be chauffeured around is choosing comfort over control, which I think is the focal dichotomy of the film. Taking the easier, more comfortable option will result in a lack of personal growth and learning. Hirayama goes to work each day to literally clean up shit. Perhaps in today’s mega-cities, where networks of conglomerates are expanding boundlessly, being a toilet-cleaner is one of the last occupations where one can tangibly see and triumph over the whole problem, top to bottom.

In striving for what I would call retro-entropy, Wenders places technical restraints on the film, which reflect the difficulty of wrangling a micro story in a city of 25 million people. The contained 4:3 aspect ratio gives the film a storybook appearance, which allows the plot to unfold in mundanity - a respectful bow to the films of Yasujirō Ozu (even the name ‘Hirayama’ appears in many of his films). But unlike Ozu’s films, which I often walk away from feeling despondent, Wenders utilises his beloved Americana needle drops to uplift the very natural and raw emotional turbulence Hirayama experiences into melancholy - a smile above despondency I assure you. These needle drops sway between diegetic and non-diegetic consciousness, painting a more translucent, but certainly not imprecise portrait of Hirayama.

The rhythm of the film is difficult to articulate, drifting between waking and dreaming. Sometimes Hirayama’s dreams, which are beautifully shot in black and white, feel more focused and defined than his waking state; the editing becoming faster and pulsating, differing to the slow, static visions of his day. However, this leisurely tempo is at no cost to our engagement, as Wenders shows us unenlightened viewers how to experience komorebi - the Japanese word for sunlight leaking through trees.

This singular moment gracefully sedates time, allowing us to spiritually reorganise ourselves and face the next moment. “Next time is next time, now is now,” Hirayama says to his niece on a bike ride.

The fluidity of time is integral to cinema itself, a passage of time, separate to all other waking-states, in which hopefully, we all sync up and feel the breeze.