PERFECT DAYS

 Wim Wenders' idea of an 'action' movie is having someone stumble after silently walking down a street for ten minutes of screen time. He is, in other words, a minimalist who draws you slowly but inexorably into his sagas of lonely men living largely isolated existences and his new film, "Perfect Days", is no exception.

His hero, Hirayama, is a middle-aged Tokyo toilet cleaner, superbly played by Koji Yakusho, (he won Best Actor at Cannes), without doing almost anything at all and Wenders simply follows him through his mostly silent days and nights as he cleans toilets, tends to his plants, takes the occasional photo, reads William Faulkner and listens to a lot of sixties and seventies American music on what we now might think of as ancient cassettes. Considering how fully Yakusho embodies his role this could just as easily be a documentary about a real toilet cleaner.

Of course, it won't be a film for everyone; its simplicity and lack of what we might call a plot could prove off-putting to a lot of people, (perhaps the nearest thing to a plot in the film deals with the love life, or lack of it, of Hirayama's co-worker). Naturally, among the music Hirayama listens to is Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day' and while his life might seem conventional and even boring to most people to Hirayama every day is perfect. So, too, is Wenders' film which, on reflection, you could even call his Japanese "Paris, Texas".