When I posted the video of Nina Simone singing "Feeling Good" last week, I did so because I had just heard the song used as theme music for this surprisingly fascinating movie.
Here's the brief "blurb" that accompanies the YouTube trailer:
Hirayama is content with his simple life cleaning toilets in Tokyo. Outside of his structured routine he cherishes music on cassette tapes, books, and taking photos of trees. Unexpected encounters reveal more of his story in a deeply moving and poetic reflection on finding beauty in the world around us.
It of course sounds underwhelming, and the absence of explosions, sex, and special effects probably diminish it in the eyes of most Americans, but I found it to be enthralling. There is no overall "plot," and very little storyline; this is basically a "slice-of-life" movie showing how someone else in this world lives.
Hirayama’s ascetic existence is stripped back to basics: music, played on cassette tapes collected, we assume, in his long-ago youth; secondhand books bought from the budget section of the local bookstore; a point-and-shoot film camera with which he captures the things that please him; the interplay between the sky and the trees...He listens to 60s and 70s American and British rock – the Velvet Underground, the Kinks, Otis Redding, Patti Smith – and Japanese folk from the same period. The song choices – in particular the Lou Reed track that gives the film its title and Nina Simone’s Feeling Good – are windows into his soul at any given moment. Hirayama has found harmony...
It’s possible that Perfect Days – Oscar-nominated for best international feature – is as much a manifesto as it is a movie – an argument in favour of an alternative way of being. Perfection, the film argues, is found in a pared-down approach to the world and a rejection of the thirst for new sensations and novelty that drives so much of society...
While watching this movie, I was reminded of my experience viewing Columbus and After Yang.
Addendum: Only one little nit to pick, from the closing scene. It absolutely drives me up the wall when filmmakers depict automobile drivers at highway speed jiggling the steering wheel left and right to emphasize that they are driving the car - a maneuver that would throw the vehicle out of control in real life. Probably the worst example was Winona Ryder as a cab driver in Night on Earth.
Perfection, the film argues, is found in a pared-down approach to the world and a rejection of the thirst for new sensations and novelty that drives so much of society...
ReplyDelete"It's not having what you want, it's wanting what you've got."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIYiGA_rIls
(at around 43s).
(Yes, yes, you can have all kinds of issues with a rich woman singing about this, and it's kind of a throw away line in the song, in art it's completely allowed to yank things out of context and interpret them as you wish.)
Another way of putting it, is that a lot of people waste a lot of time staring at their neighbor's grass instead of tending to their own.
Yanking to a wildly different cultural reference, Voltaire's Candide said: If faut cultiver notre jardin - We have to tend to our garden.
(Yes yes, Voltaire was providing thinly veiled commentary on foreign affairs politics of the day, but with or without that context, the meaning remains the same).
You gotta take care of yourself before you can really take case of others.
Around our house, absurd movement of the steering wheel is called "Tom Bosleying." When he portrays Sheriff Amos Tupper on Murder, She Wrote his fake driving is all we can look at during any car scene. The steering wheel is never still.
ReplyDeleteI loved this film very much. I think it's not so much an "argument" as it is a poem. Like the concept of komorebi, human experience of life is ever-shifting shades of grey, dappled, blinding, brilliant and dark.
ReplyDelete