Film Review
Warning: Spoilers ahead
I recently watched Perfect Days. A quiet film that lingers long after the screen fades to black.
Every day is the same. Hirayama wakes in his spartan apartment, pulls on his overalls, takes a can of coffee from a vending machine and sets out in his modest van to start work – cleaning Tokyo’s public toilets. Diligently. Devotedly. Happily.
A Zen-like film with repetitive rituals: waking up before dawn, folding bedding, watering plants, listening to cassette tapes, reading books, going to the laundromat, etc.
Every day after work, he takes a moment to capture sunlight filtering through trees with his modest film camera. He then develops, sorts and organizes the photographs, rather meticulously, chronologically, in several tin boxes.
Hirayama lives slowly in a world that moves fast. Very fast.
The movie reiterates the fact that happiness lies in life’s small, day to day moments. Life is about finding magic in the mundane. About finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. About making peace with oneself.
The film resonated with me on various levels, except that I am not a toilet cleaner, and I don’t live as reclusively.
Life contains joy, sadness and acceptance all at once. Life is not perfect for anyone, but the act of living – of noticing small details and savoring fleeting beautiful moments – light, trees, music – these moments have the capacity to make a day perfect. Like the way Hirayama notices the vagrant man who cramps up while the rest of the world walks past.
His encounter with his sister hints at his previous affluent life, and his estranged relationship with his abusive father. It suggests that he did not always work as a toilet cleaner. I suspect that something made him renounce his affluent ways for a simple, routine-driven, meaningful life.
The tic-tac-toe game is one of the film’s most charming moments. Hirayama finds a piece of paper with a tic-tac-toe grid hidden in a public toilet. Someone has made a first move. Instead of ignoring it, he responds to it with his own moves. Neither player ever meets the other, but the game continues spicing up his routine life.
Two strangers, a scrap of paper, a simple game – one can find joy in the most unexpected places right in the middle of everyday life – a public toilet in this case.
A happy life is not about status, it is about discovering peace in the ordinary.
Cleaning toilets is almost like a scared ritual to him. For Hirayama, dignity does not come from status, but from how sincerely he does his work. Another scene speaks volumes of his character: the time he notices a tiny plant growing out of a crack in the concrete. He takes it home and tends to it along with several other plants.
Despite his simple lifestyle, Hirayama has a rich, inner world. His life appears boring and minimal on the surface but is full of meaning on the inside.
The movie will shift something within you. It will renew your perspective on life. It will make you want to perceive your daily routine differently.
Perfect days will make you want to slow down and pause long enough to notice tiny miracles unfurling all around – taking time to look up at the sky, capturing sunlight leaking through leaves, really listening to a song playing in the car, and more such fragments that beautify our days and make them perfect.
Perfect days feels less like a film and more like a quiet meditation on how to live.
Go, take the plunge!
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About the Author
Swati Moheet Agrawal is a mother who loves giving depth to the banal, and writing makes her world more navigable. Her work has appeared in The Alipore Post, Sledgehammer Lit, Mad Swirl, The Dribble Drabble Review, Potato Soup Journal, Muse India, Active Muse, Setu, and The Criterion among other literary magazines and journals.
