Sapporo's secret treasure-house, Theatre Kino, is once again offering us a wonderful Springtime of films. In March and April we will have a feast of cinema. The first gift is Perfect Days. It's the story of a man who works for the Tokyo Toilet Cleaning Company. (A miraculous performance by Koji Yakusho.)
He lives a quiet life, but he finds pleasure in the things that most people don't have time to think about: sunlight through the trees, a homeless man dancing in the park, the words of pop songs he heard in his youth many years ago.
The gentle pace of the film may remind you of Yasujiro Ozu. No surprise here: the director of Perfect Days is Wim Wenders, a German who has spent half a century making films, as if Ozu was looking over his shoulder. In fact, Wenders visited the Ozu grave in Kamakura 40 years ago, making his documentary film Tokyo-ga.
Perfect Days is almost a perfect film; it also has a perfect soundtrack, including the title song by Lou Reed, and songs by Van Morrison, Otis Redding, the great Nina Simone, and many others from the 1960s and 70s. If you want to return to a more simple time, reading paperback books late at night, listening to analogue cassette tapes,
using a film camera, and not looking at your phone every five minutes, you really have to go see this remarkable film.
A BIG Thank you to Yakusho San, and Wim Wenders..!
(showing at Theatre Kino in Sapporo, until March 15th..)
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