Nos­tal­gia for the Lights: Wim Wen­ders’ Tokyo stories

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.

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

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