Nostalgia for the Lights: Wim Wenders’ Tokyo… | Little White Lies

Partnership

Nos­tal­gia for the Lights: Wim Wen­ders’ Tokyo stories

22 Feb 2024

Words by David Jenkins

Two Asian women sitting on a bench in a wooded area, smiling and interacting with each other.
Two Asian women sitting on a bench in a wooded area, smiling and interacting with each other.
How the Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed Per­fect Days sees the globe-trot­ting Ger­man film­mak­er in uni­son with his sur­round­ings in the Japan­ese capital.

At the begin­ning of his 1985 doc­u­men­tary Tokyo Ga, made due to a pro­duc­tion delay in his then-forth­com­ing fic­tion fea­ture Paris, Texas, Wim Wen­ders speaks of his desire to cap­ture the dis­tinct pas­tel hues of the Tokyo land­scape. Ever the aes­thete, he tries to make sure he has the cor­rect cam­eras and lens­es for this par­tic­u­lar job, and the film doc­u­ments how he takes inspi­ra­tion from the lacon­ic, pre­cise work of the late, very great film­mak­er, Yasu­jiro Ozu, in achiev­ing his aims.

It is in this con­text that Wen­ders’ new, Oscar-nom­i­nat­ed fea­ture, Per­fect Days, plays out, a wist­ful exam­i­na­tion of soci­ety and cul­ture as pre­sent­ed through the lens of an easy­go­ing pub­lic toi­let clean­er. As with the iron­i­cal­ly-titled Lou Reed song with which it (almost) shares its name, it’s a film about hap­pi­ness as an elu­sive ide­al that is inex­tri­ca­bly tied to sad­ness, loss, regret and pain, but some­thing that’s still very much worth striv­ing for.

Just as the filmmaker’s work is pock­marked with his own per­son­al, some­times intrigu­ing and eso­teric pas­sions, Per­fect Days is about not just appre­ci­at­ing, but los­ing our­selves in the every­day minu­ti­ae around us. Wen­ders’ cam­era imbues the small things we take for grant­ed – includ­ing vis­it­ing the restroom – with a sense of the miraculous.

Wen­ders’ glob­al pere­gri­na­tions have been thor­ough­ly doc­u­ment­ed in the films he has made, a reflec­tion of the fact that his pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny, estab­lished in 1976 and still truckin’, is famous­ly called Road Movies. And while he har­bours a deep fas­ci­na­tion for places such as Berlin or the Amer­i­can South, his cin­e­mat­ic obses­sion with Ozu lends Tokyo a cer­tain emo­tion­al import with­in his oeu­vre. Much like its director’s yen for look­ing beyond cul­tur­al bor­ders, Per­fect Days is a film about a man named Haraya­ma (Koji Yakusho) whose cul­tur­al fix­a­tions geo­graph­i­cal­ly strad­dle both his home­town (col­lect­ing and cul­ti­vat­ing Bon­sai trees), and the Unit­ed States (col­lect­ing clas­sic Amer­i­can rock albums on tape, watch­ing base­ball, read­ing William Faulkn­er novels).

In Tokyo Ga, Wen­ders approach­es his film with ref­er­en­tial fas­ci­na­tion for the coun­try and its peo­ple. Like all good doc­u­men­taries, it is a lov­ably ram­bling chron­i­cle of the research process rather than an encap­su­la­tion of a pre-ordained the­sis. There’s a slight anthro­po­log­i­cal bent to it, in the way the film­mak­er wants to tease out the things that make Japan­ese cul­ture unique from the rest of the world, such as its busy Pachinko par­lours, its love of wax food mod­els, or an obses­sion bring­ing cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy to even the most banal domes­tic chores.

Retro arcade with rows of vintage pinball and slot machines, orange seating, and a person at the counter.

On the evi­dence of Per­fect Days, one can detect that Wen­ders now has a clear­er sense of the lay of the land. His depic­tion of the land­scape and his empha­sis on cer­tain details is now a lit­tle more mut­ed and focused. He is no longer a stranger in a strange land, a cine-tourist who is soak­ing up and pro­cess­ing an over­whelm­ing bar­rage of sen­su­al stig­ma. This is the oth­er side of Tokyo, one that the cam­eras (cer­tain­ly those being clutched by West­ern hands) depict much less often than usual.

It is pos­si­ble to chart the evo­lu­tion between the more wide-eyed Wim of Tokyo Ga and the more cir­cum­spect Wim of Per­fect Days. Tokyo was one of many stops in his globe-trot­ting sci-fi fol­ly, Until the End of the World, from 1991. For a rel­a­tive­ly short 15-minute seg­ment (part of the film’s epic five-hour run­time), he stages a screw­ball shoot-out in one of the city’s famed cap­sule hotels. As with Tokyo Ga, he selects this par­tic­u­lar loca­tion, with its can­tan­ker­ous salary­men attempt­ing to nap, as an exam­ple of one of the city’s more eccen­tric inno­va­tions, and it feels a lit­tle as if the direc­tor is still trapped in his exoti­cis­ing tourist mode.

But the real gate­way through to Per­fect Days is Wen­ders’ 2009 pho­tog­ra­phy exhi­bi­tion, Jour­ney to Onomichi, in which he pays direct homage to his favourite film of all time: Ozu’s Tokyo Sto­ry. The show and accom­pa­ny­ing book chart his vis­it to the sleepy sea­side town where the major­i­ty of Tokyo Sto­ry takes place, and while it’s pos­si­ble to see the archi­tec­ture of the 1950s in the images, you have to see it through a process of mod­erni­sa­tion and indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion. Just as Ozu told a sto­ry of bit­ter­sweet gen­er­a­tional rifts and the melan­choly of time pass­ing, so does Wen­ders in Per­fect Days show a world – and social atti­tudes – from yes­ter­year just bub­bling beneath the shiny surface.

Per­fect Days is released in UK cin­e­mas on Feb­ru­ary 23. Find screen­ings and book tick­ets at mubi​.com/​p​e​r​f​e​c​tdays

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.