FNC 2023: Close to a “Perfect Day”
Philippe Katerine & Sophie Letourneur on FNC stage (Photo by Donato Totaro)
New German legend Wim Wenders is back to his best with this precious, contemplative yet eventful film about the quietness of the everyday, a subject or theme befitting of the director whose spirit is reflected in this film Yasujiro Ozu. Wenders returns to the country he last visited in 1985 with Tokyo-Ga, in which he travelled in search for the Japan he imagined through Ozu’s films: trains, alleyways, storefronts, tatami mats. Here the standout performance is from Kôji Yakusho. Oddly, whereas the great actor Chishû Ryû was the favorite actor and muse for Yasujiro Ozu (like Kang-Sheng Lee is for Ming-liang Tsai, Robert De Niro is for Martin Scorsese), Kôji Yakusho is that for Kyoshi Kurosawa. And aside from the films of Ozu, Perfect Day has some nice reverberations with Kurosawa’s masterpiece Tokyo Sonata, which also featured Yakusho in the small but important role of a bungling kidnapper. Here Yakusho plays Hirayama, a janitorial attendant who takes his task of doing sanitary maintenance work for the city’s public toilets with pride and dedication.
Compared to his much younger co-worker, who wonders what the point is of cleaning bathrooms so diligently when they will just get dirty again. While the film is above all a humanist study in character, with a hint of Buddhist Zen dedication to the value in doing simple things well, Wenders also injects social insight into questions of class, seen most stridently in the single encounter he was with his estranged sister, who shows up with a fancy car and valet to pick up her daughter, who ran away from home to stay with her uncle. The sister looks at his apartment and condescendingly asks, “So this is where you live…..” and “Is it true you clean toilets?” Here Wenders is certainly (or I would like to think) making reference to F.W. Murnau’s German classic The Last Laugh, where Emil Jannings plays a once proud hotel doorman who is stricken with social shame when he is demoted to lowly lavatory attendant.
Likewise I see strong parallels to Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata, and the middle management salaryman Ryûhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) who is so shamed when he is let go that he continues the folly of pretending to go to work to avoid letting his family know that he is no longer the family bread winner. And when he has no choice, accepts the demeaning (for someone of his previous status) job of lavatory attendant. But something changes in the course of a series of bizarre events (which may not in fact be even happening in reality) and by the end of the film he learns the importance of doing even this job well. Ultimately, any job, regardless of its status, must be done well.
Perfect Day is a film about routine and how present routine is in everyone’s life. We get up at the same time, go to work, shop, wash, eat, sleep, wake-up. Repeat. Same old same old, call it what you will, but everyone, poor or rich, young or old, is conditioned by life’s cyclical nature. Wenders understands this and makes it apparent in two striking ways. Every morning Hirayama is awoken in the early hours by the rustling sound of a broom sweeping the floor outside his apartment. For one brief moment we see the diligent sweeper, an elderly lady cleaning the front of her house. That lady’s duty of getting up at the same time to brush her front walk is her daily routine. Her sweeping is Hirayama’s alarm clock. Hirayama is this film’s protagonist. It is his world we are visiting, but another world exists alongside Hirayami’s in the shape of the elderly lady who sweeps. The theme of the everyday-for-everyone is present in this subtle gesture. The closing moments of the film does something similar. After a somber night where he meets the dying ex-husband of the lady whose bar he frequents (another nod to Tokyo Story, and the way the Chishû Ryû character visits a local bar on his way home because the owner/bartendress looks like his dead wife), Hirayama begins yet another day, driving to work and listening to his favorite rock songs on cassette tape. This time something seems different. Maybe he’s achieved an epiphany. The camera stays on his face, as the changing sunlight uses his face like a canvas, painting light textures over it (a moment that reminded me of the scene on beach scene in Tokyo Sonata where the sleepwalking wife walks slowly along the shoreline as the morning sun slowly rises to cast her face in beautiful shades of golden yellow, which also can be read as a new dawn in that film). The song he is listening to, Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” suggests this, “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me.” Or maybe not. Maybe it is just a reaffirmation of Hirayama’s commitment to the everyday, his acceptance that each new day brings with it the same and the possibility for the new.
To return to my earlier point of how the film suggests the one is the many. After a long take on Hirayama’s every changing face, where actor Yakusho’s expressions radiant from joy, tears, hope, acceptance, the shot cuts to a nondescript long shot of the Tokyo cityscape. With one abrupt cut Wenders’ takes us from the singular, Hirayama, to the general, the city, and all the strangers living their own lives within. As Hirayama explains to his niece, who asks him why he and his mother (his sister) are so estranged, Hirayama tells her that there are many worlds within one, and that he and his sister live in different worlds. To which she replies, in a single line that tells us so much about a character we’ve only seen for a few minutes, “Which world do I live in?” This edit from the singular to the general is reminiscent of a similar cut, one which has always hit me in the stomach emotionally, the cut in Tokyo Sonata from a close-up of salaryman Teruyuki Kagawa moments after he learns that his old schoolfriend committed double suicide with his wife, to a slow motion long shot of the concrete jungle cityscape of Tokyo.
Wenders’ use of music in Perfect Day (which takes its title from the Lou Reed song), is sublime. Outside of these (largely 1960s, 1970s) rock songs, there is no non-diegetic music in the film (at least that I noticed after one viewing). All we hear is what Hirayama wants to listen to. And in keeping with his routine-driven days, he only listens to music while driving to work, and maybe a few times in his apartment. The songs speak volumes for the film’s themes of acceptance, routine, simplicity, or reflect Hirayama’s state of mind.
Another level the film works at, already suggested in my analysis, is an intertextual level. The scene where Hirayama visits the bar owned by a middle-aged woman is a lovely nod to An Autumn Afternoon, where the widower played by Chishû Ryû routinely visits a bar on his way home from work, largely because the lady owner reminds him of his dead wife. At the bar he also talks with a few other male customers, small talk about the War, Nationhood and life in general. For starters, Wender’s Hirayama shares his name with the widower from An Autumn Afternoon, Shuhei Hirayama. And In Perfect Day he discovers that the lady’s ex-husband has terminal cancer, and the man in the single exchange with Hirayama, asks him to “look after her”, to which he quickly replies, “It’s not like that.”
Another filmmaker this film is in dialogue with, is another Japanophile, Jim Jarmusch, a director also known for his predilection for aestheticizing the everyday and the routine. Perfect Day recalls Paterson (2016), named after the city where the central character, a blue-collar bus driver (Adam Driver), works and lives his days committed to the everyday (work, write poetry, spend time with his girlfriend, chance encounters with strangers). And shares a spirit with the routinized existence of hipster vampires in Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) and hipster bohemians in Stranger Than Paradise (1984). Hirayama’s photography recalls a photography ritual performed by Harvey Keitel’s character from Wayne Wang’s Smoke (1995). Each morning Auggie Wren takes a single photograph of his tobacco shop from the same position across the street, working toward a blow by blow history of the changing times. In Perfect Day Hirayama takes photographs of the same subjects (usually trees in the park where he daily eats his lunch) and then once developed sifts through them selecting the wheat from the chaff, ripping the chaff and throwing the picture away and placing the wheat in dated aluminum shoe boxes that are stored meticulously in a closet.
Stylisitcally, Perfect Day is a return of sorts to Wenders’ earlier works where form suggested the emotional resonances of its characters (depression, alienation, restlessness, etc.). Wenders shoots his film in the old academy aspect ratio of 1.33:1, partly as a gesture of aesthetic sympathy with Yasujiro Ozu, who never shot a film in any other aspect ratio. The pacing, use of slightly longer takes, simple editing all recall Ozu, but there is much here that veers from Ozu. Structurally, Wenders’s narrative follows his character’s daily routines, showing us repeating scenes of Hirayama waking up, shaving, buying coffee from a vending machine outside his apartment, driving to work, etc. But the effect is not one of “making a boring film to represent boredom.” Some of Hirayama’s routines allow Wenders space for stylistic variance. Like Hirayama’s nightly dreams, which Wenders shoots in an impressionist style, in black and white with overlapping imagery. And the thematically resonant songs are ultimately chosen by Wenders so each song brings its own emotion and tone to the film (like the wonderful inclusion of the Japanese pop song from 1972 Aoi Sakana (Blue Fish) by Sanchiko Kanenobu amidst the dominance of Anglo-American samplings). The music also allows Wenders to explore generational issues (a major theme to Ozu’s work) when he bonds with his younger co-worker’s girlfriend over the Patti Smith song “Redondo Beach.” Or the way analog media is making a comeback with the younger generation, depicted in a scene where his co-worker takes him to a vinyl record store with the hope of selling Hirayama’s cassette tapes so he can borrow money for a date with the much hipper, attractive girl. As expected, Hirayama has no attention of selling his tapes, regardless of the bloated prices he can receive, and lends him money out of pocket instead. When his niece asks him if a particular song on his tape is available on Spotify, Hirayami reveals how disconnected he is from the world around him when he says that he is not sure, and then asks “where the place is.” But his niece does not laugh or embarrass him. Wenders would not have it any other way. This film is a smile-a-thon.
Voyages en Italie (Sophie Letourneur, 2023, France)
The FNC 2023 maintained a playful dialogue between the past and present across many sections of the festival. For example, the mega cult star Bruce Lee was feted with a mini focus that was bookended by a 50th anniversary screening of the 4K restoration of the 1973 film Enter the Dragon, paired off with a new documentary by David Gregory about the Bruce Lee imitators phenomenon Enter the Clones of Bruce (2023), capped off with three of the finest Bruce Lee knock-offs, Challenge of the Tiger (1980), Ninja Strikes Back (1984) and The Dragon Lives Again (1977). Philippine Khavan is represented with two historically oriented films, an experimental collage of lost silent Philippine films, Nitrate to the Ghosts of the 75 Lost Philippine Silent Films 1912-1933 (2023) and National Anarchist: Lino Brocka (2023).
One of the more fascinating past/present diptychs is the paring of Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 Post Neo-realist masterpiece Voyage to Italy (1954) starring George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman as the fated couple, with Sophie Letourneur’s light-hearted remake Voyages en Italie (2023). Letourneur’s film, who also writes and stars, is an interesting remake of the original because it borrows the skeleton of the plot –married couple try to salvage their failing relationship with a trip to Sicily and the Aeolian Islands (Naples and Pompeii in the Italian film) – but uses the plot for different cultural and thematic reasons. There are more differences than similarities outside of the plot borrowing. Letourneur does pay homage to the original with a few shots, like Sophie posing in front of a huge sculpture for a photograph. And Letourneur also cites another Rossellini/Bergman film Stromboli, by having them seek out the famous island and view it from a distance. But differences abound. Whereas Katherine (Bergman) and Alex (Sanders) are childless, slightly older and upper class, Sophie and Philippe are middle class and have a single young child, Raoul. Whereas the Rossellini film begins in Italy, Letourneur’s film begins with the couple in Paris, deliberating over where to go and who to leave their child with. Both couples constantly bicker and argue but whereas Katherine and Alex can be cruel, curt and nasty with each other, Sophie and Philippe are more weathered and listless in their exchanges. Their disagreements are often trivial in nature, whereas in the Rossellini film the characters seem to have disdain for each other. I would sum up the differences by noting that the Rossellini film is a classic early modernist text, while Letourneur’s film assumes a lighter Post-modern approach. Whereas the first film has an epiphany at the end (which shocked most critics at the time seeing the spontaneous reaffirmation of their love as wholly inappropriate to what had transpired), in the 2023 version there are no epiphanies in the story, which values the ordinary, a fact clearly set out in the opening exchange between them: “We need to get away, that’s the answer – If we’ve got problems, leaving isn’t going to solve them – We have to make the ordinary extraordinary – No, because the ordinary isn’t extraordinary"; but an epiphany of sorts occurs for the viewer, when near the end of the film the ‘vacation’ ends abruptly and Sophie and (Jean-Philippe Katerine) Philippe are back in their Paris apartment lying in bed recalling their vacation, with flashbacks to earlier events filled in with more detail (hotel bedroom scenes are heavily featured in the vacation part as well). This meta-gesture places this firmly in the postmodern context (as does the overall lighter tone). The end also includes a chance encounter with a friend who also travelled to Italy and she recounts a different experience, which included conceiving their first child while in Italy. This is why the title is plural, ‘voyages’ in Italy, compared to the singular of Rossellini’s title: Voyage in Italy. The credit scenes are accompanied by home movies with a slightly younger looking Sophie Letourneur and a boy we assume is her son. When she addressed the audience Q&A she mentioned that the film was based on a trip she took to Sicily in 2016 with her son Raoul, hence what we saw are her home movies. Stylistically, the film sets up a contrast between these bedroom scenes, including the only time they have sex, which are shot on 35mm, and the vacation footage, which are shot digitally and visually leans strongly into the digital look, very sharp, almost brutal in its sharpness and hyper realism (maybe a response to Rossellini’s reactive move away from the objective realism of neo-realism).
Substrat (Karl Lemieux, Quebec, 2023)
Karl Lemieux is well known among the avant-garde and experimental film circles of Montreal as the co-founder of the Montreal Double Negative Film Collective, who promote the production and distribution of 8mm, 16mm and 35mm experimental film. Lemieux’s latest film is a painted on film collaborative effort with visual effects artist Patrick Bergeron and musicians B. J. Nilsen and Visions. It is a film best experienced than described, difficult as it is to express into words. But I’ll try. At under 15 minutes Lemieux’s film is best described as a slow motion moving abstract expressionist painting. Largely black & white the film, an amorphous pattern of slowly pulsating and constantly mutating black, white and grey imagery, captivates the mind, as it tries to understand exactly the nature of what you are watching. The film is seamless, appearing without any editing or fragmentation, enveloped by the ambient music which gives the images a living, breathing texture. The work is a mesmerizing composite meeting of minds between analog (shot on film) and digital (post-production and digitally animated)
Been There (Corina Schwingruber Ilić, Switzerland, 2023)
Been There is a light-hearted documentary snapshot of world tourism. Director Ilić takes her camera all over the most popular tourist spots (which all remain unidentified) filming tourists being tourists. Cutting from country to country the effect is an organic whole, established by a uniformity of style across all the different locations (no dialogue, natural sunlight, all during daytime, preference for long shots, fluid camera movements). The end result is a montage of routine, repetitive actions, with the many constants being people taking photographs and selfies (lots of selfies), posing, lining up, gawking at famous sites and resting. Ilić injects humor by filming three or four anti-tourist graffiti that quietly remind us that not everyone appreciates the annual worldly tourist invasion (adding to the comedy, tourists film the insulting writing as if a badge of honor worthy of their photo album!).
Syncopated Green (Arjuna Neuman, 2023, UK)
This is an interesting if not entirely successful attempt to create an aesthetic rhythmic whole blending a variety of medium choices. The film is broken into three parts each titled by a techno ambient track that guides the images. The first part begins in the National Gallery of London with a digital camera filming mainly landscape paintings. The camera cuts closer to move into the painted fields and grasses but then cuts to 16mm footage (with sprockets revealed to underscore the celluloid of it) of similar pastoral settings. Each new section is prefixed by a round mirror object that is modelled after a woman holding a hand mirror in one the paintings. It reflects surrounding imagery and then gives way to the main footage. The second part echoes the song title, Pastoral Rave, by filming gorgeous 16mm natural footage of animals (deer, cow) and forest setting. A hand holds the round mirrored object which reflects people dancing, which gives way to period video found footage of a forest rave from circa the 1980s (confirmed as 1989 in the credits). The third part, Crystal Voyager, features mainly more found footage intercut with 16mm nature footage, ending with a pastoral long shot of grazing cows. The overall effect never quite achieves a perfect organic whole but the result is still pleasing to the senses and intrigues in the way it combines so many different collage elements (high def digital footage, 16mm footage, video and camcorder images, varied aspect ratios).