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Perfect Days, German filmmaker Wim Wenders’s first fiction feature in six years, was partially inspired by toilets. After COVID-related travel restrictions eased, retail executive Koji Yanai invited Wenders to Japan to check out the work being done on the Tokyo Toilet Project, an initiative Yanai spearheaded to aesthetically zhuzh up several public-bathroom locations across the city. Short films were envisioned by Yanai; Wenders could more vividly see something longer, more character-driven.

Toilets remain flush in Perfect Days. But the particularities of the project surrounding them are of less interest than the day-to-day life of its quiet, middle-aged bathroom-cleaner protagonist, Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho), over the course of two weeks. The first hour of the movie fascinatedly surveys the peaceful mundanity of his routine, lending his everyday rituals — the trimming of a mustache, the delicate spraying of some houseplants — momentousness. Yakusho’s gentle performance implies someone not lonely but content, eking out just enough motivating joy from after-work customs like reading and nature photography whose best snapshots are dutifully organized by month in his bedroom closet. 

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