[Film Review] Perfect Days (2023) and Anselm (2023)

Title: Perfect Days
Year: 2023
Country: Japan, Germany
Language: Japanese, English
Genre: Drama
Director: Wim Wenders
Screenwriters: Wim Wenders, Takuma Takasaki
Cinematography: Franz Lustig
Editor: Toni Froschhammer
Cast:
Kôji Yakusho
Tokio Emoto
Arisa Nakano
Tomokazu Miura
Aoi Yamada
Sayuri Ishikawa
Yumi Asô
Inuko Inuyama
Min Tanaka
Mijika Nagai
Rating: 7.8/10
English Title: Anselm
Original Title: Anselm – Das Rauschen der Zeit
Year: 2023
Country: Germany
Language: German, English
Genre: Documentary
Director: Wim Wenders
Music: Leonard Küßner
Cinematography: Franz Lustig
Editor: Maxine Goedicke
Cast:
Anselm Kiefer
Anton Wenders
Daniel Kiefer
Rating: 7.3/10

Wenders’s one-two punch in 2023, both PERFECT DAYS and ANSELM premiered in Cannes, where the former cops a meritorious Best Actor honor for veteran Japanese actor Kôji Yakusho. The latter is a 3D documentary about German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer (born 1945), continuing Wenders the auteur’s unrelenting experiment on artist documentation after Pina Bausch and Sebastião Salgado.

The Tokyo-set PERFECT DAYS can also be watched as a sort of “documentation”. It is about Hirayama (Yakusho), a middle-aged public toilet cleaner whose workload encompasses the 17 public bathrooms belonging to “The Tokyo Toilet Project”, redesigned in the upscale Shibuya district by 16 creators invited from around the world. Each of them is an art piece itself, bearing its unique layout and formation (one of which, imagineered by architect Shigeru Ban, has an innovative function to protect privacy through the switch from transparency to opacity).

A loner in its most strict sense, Hirayama conducts his daily routines like a clockwork ritual. He gets up at dawn, waters the plants, prepares himself to go out, drinks a can of coffee then drives to work, eats a sandwich nearby a shrine for lunch. After work he goes to a public bathroom for ablution and enjoys his dinner in a subway food stand. In his spare times, he nourishes himself in music (he has an eclectic collection of cassettes and Wenders compiles an absolutely marvelous mixtape mostly consists of western classic tunes) and reading (Faulkner, Highsmith and Aya Kôda), taking pictures of trees. At weekends, he does laundry, cleans his apartment, peruses his photo collections, gets his film developed, buys a new book with a knockdown price, patronizing a local bar for libation. It is a self-sufficient existence of total tranquility and contentment, of minimal interactions with other people (only a cameo from a self-reflective Tomokazu Miura near the coda brings about some levity and affinity between two men of a similar age), monotonous yet autonomous, devoid of any superfluous obligations. For someone with social anxiety disorder, it is quite dreamy!

Observing Hirayama’s life in his curious but placid eyes, Wenders serves up no explanation for his solitude, nor how come an intellectual like him ends up with such a menial job, which he does with fastidious professionalism. Hirayama’s obliging temperament and quintessential good nature is reflected through his self-abnegating behavior with a younger coworker Takashi (Emoto), an importunate wastrel, by whom Hirayama doesn’t mind being taken advantage of, despite his taciturn attitude (“silence is gold” is a precept he abides by devoutly). During his sleep, Wenders deploys flickering, shadowgraphic black-and-white imagery to conceptualize and reify Hirayama’s oneiric contents, where dream logic and diurnal happenstances are colligated via a brilliant artistic construct.

The unbidden advent of his teenager niece Niko (Nakano) upsets Hirayama’s serene routines, but only temporarily. Given an opportunity to bond with an estranged relative, Hirayama is adept at being “the good uncle”, and later a brief encounter with Keiko (Asô), Niko’s well-to-do mother and his sister, alludes to his troubled past (a bitter relationship with his father is all we can gather), and betrays that he may not be of blue-collar provenance after all. The underlying class prejudice rears its head momentarily. Like the fancy toilets he cleans, should the janitor also be yassified? However, any suspicion of patronization is squarely dissipated by Yakusho’s self-effacing warmth, silent tranquility and intrinsic goodness, which can make even the most banal occasion transcend its ordinariness and reach a performative stratosphere. It is simply soul-cleansing. Who would ever forget his cordial smile, not least in the film’s final shot, a close-up long take on Yakusho’s visage, with emotions segueing from smile to poignance. Capsulated by film’s afterword “Komorebi, a Japanese word for the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. It only exists once, at that moment”, PERFECT DAYS is a homage to the sedative ideation of “wabi-sabi” through Wenders’ top-notch Ozu-esque meditation and calibration.

ANSELM carries over the solipsistic doctrine of PERFECT DAYS, in which Wenders permits only Anselm’s massively imposing plastic arts to speak for themselves. There is no objective views can be garnered from other interviewees besides the artist himself, who only occasionally talks in an abstruse manner as if he is a mystagogue, commingled with footage of him holding forth in an erstwhile television interview, his practice on pyrography, and Wenders’s artistic license of creating two young versions of Anselm to either interact with him or re-enact his life, culminating in the confluence of two Anselms (one of today, one a preteen boy) near a still lake.

Most of the time, audience is left to savor the scorched-earth, clapped-out, bleak, sometimes edging towards sepulchral, expressions of Anselm’s opuses (however, it requests an art connoisseur to remark on his eclectic style and methods), the oceanic scale, cavernous space and appreciable amount of which is staggering. Accompanied by Küßner’s somber yet lilting score, the overwhelming impressions of all this constitute an exemplum of Gesamtkunstwerk, a nearly fully immersive experience within an artist’s realm, one could only conjecture what virtual reality will do in the near future, to further and upgrade such experience to the nth degree!

Your mileage may vary, but any semblance of the soi-disant “Stendhal syndrome”, once successfully derived from THE SALT OF THE EARTH, Wenders’s documentary on Sebastião Salgado, isn’t forthcoming this time, which could chiefly attribute to in want of a profound connection with Anselm the artist, who remains as opaque as ever by refusing having his brain picked, which Wenders acquiesces. For what it is worth, ANSELM has no difficulty to pique audience’s interest to see his paintings, installations and site-specific artworks in person, which, in fact, is the minimal function an art documentary manages to implement. Speaking for myself, I am equally enticed to read poems of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, if that doesn’t fall into Wenders and Anselm’s intentions.

referential entries: Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado’s THE SALT OF THE EARTH (2014, 8.0/10); Wenders’s PINA (2011, 8.1/10), UNTIL THE END OF THE WORLD (1991, 7.5/10); Yasujirô Ozu’s AN AUTUMN’S AFTERNOON (1962, 8.4/10).

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