Perfect Days

Wim Wenders' Perfect Days began as an unusual commission. The Tokyo Toilet Project, a public-art initiative that hired sixteen architects (Tadao Ando and Shigeru Ban among them) to redesign public lavatories across Shibuya, invited Wenders to make a series of short films about it. He proposed a feature instead, co-wrote it with Takuma Takasaki, and shot it in seventeen days in Tokyo with a small Japanese crew.

Kōji Yakusho (the veteran star of Shall We Dance?, Cure and 13 Assassins) plays the central role and won Best Actor at Cannes 2023, the second Japanese actor to win the prize, after Yūya Yagira in 2004. Japan chose the film as its submission for the 2024 Academy Awards despite its German co-production status, and it was nominated for Best International Feature Film. Wenders was also nominated for Best Director at the European Film Awards. Franz Lustig, his longtime cinematographer, shot it on 35mm in the Academy ratio.

The soundtrack, built from cassettes of Lou Reed's Perfect Day, Patti Smith, Otis Redding and Van Morrison, took on a life of its own: it charted in Japan and was reissued on vinyl. The film continues a fascination with Japan that goes back decades, to the documentary Tokyo-Ga in 1985 and to Wenders' friendship with Yasujirō Ozu's collaborators, and it plays in many ways as the late-period reply to that earlier essay-film.