So ahead of the film opening in the UK on 23 of February, it’s easy to see why there are serious expectations.
Middle-aged Hirayama works cleaning public toilets in Tokyo – a job that he takes great care and pride in. His life is a simple and highly ritualised one. He hardly ever speaks, but is polite, respectful, helpful to – and concerned about – everyone he comes into contact with.
Beyond his job, he enjoys listening to music on old-fashioned cassettes, takes care of a small indoor garden of tiny, potted trees and reads literary books each night in his humble and simple home. He eats, bathes and takes his lunch in the same places – the latter, in a park, where he photographs the trees on a compact, non-digital camera that he buys a new roll of film for on his day off once a week. On that same day off, he visits the same small bar.
The first part of Wenders’s film shows us this is extraordinary detail, where it acts, in effect, as a meditation on meditation – a film about living as mindfully as possible and taking pleasure in the simple things in life. There is something of the monk’s life about Hirayama. But there is a constant of joy constantly found in the smallest things.
However, when Hirayama’s carefully structured life is disturbed, we start to learn – obliquely, leaving the viewer to draw conclusions and realise the pain that is present – that he must have had a previous life that was quite different to the one he’s living now.
The film had an extraordinary conception. Wenders was approached by the Tokyo Toilet project to visit a city he loves and to make small documentaries about the project, which had seen top architects design 17 public toilets in the Shibuya district of the city – architecture being another Wenders passion.
Visiting to see said toilets, Wenders decided a fictional feature film would be a better way to showcase the new conveniences – and he convinced the project leaders that he could make such on a small budget and film it in the same 16 days they’d factored in for the mini docs.
The result is quite extraordinary – hugely dependent on an astonishingly beautiful performance from Yakusho as Hirayama.
Wenders wrote the film alongside Takuma Takasaki, with Frank Lustig as cinematographer.
The toilets themselves are obviously crucial to this – and they are quite extraordinary pieces of civic architecture. Yet even as the camera explores them in detail – and although they were prime motivation for the film – they never threaten to overwhelm it.
And Wenders pays as much care and attention to the Tokyo urbanscape in general, so often coming back to focus on the city’s Skytree tower, which seems to be at the hub of a physical circle within which Hirayama lives and works. This is, in part, a love letter to the city and to its culture. And that culture is absolutely a working-class culture.
There is also a thread that runs through the film, between the days, of B&W images of Hirayama’s dreams, created by Donata Wenders.
And then there is the soundtrack, from The Animals to Patti Smith to Nina Simone – and a couple of Japanese tracks, including a Japanese cover of The House of the Rising Sun – and an absolute needle drop of Lou Reed’s Perfect Day.
It’s two hours long. You might think that, from my description here, it sounds a tad tedious. Funnily enough, I saw it last night at a press screening, courtesy of a friend, who before it started, was bemoaning a film they’d seen earlier that day by a favourite director, which was an example of slow cinema and had prompted the comment that perhaps that type of film was done for.
This, on the other hand, is mesmerising, beautiful cinema. Wenders has, one critic noted, made his “lifetime masterpiece”.
And I will reiterate: Yakusho’s performance is simply outstanding. And yes – that includes an incredible final shot. This is amazing filmmaking.
Guardian architecture feature about the Tokyo toilets
New Yorker interview with Wim Wenders
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