When the headlines become overwhelming, a movie can offer somewhere to place your attention without demanding an immediate response. Leonard Quart’s column in The Berkshire Edge introduces precisely that subject: taking refuge in film. The idea deserves consideration beyond the familiar promise of escapism. Sometimes the relief comes from watching another person move through a difficult world at a pace that allows us to notice them.
Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days offers a compelling way to explore that possibility. This is an independent critical response to the question Quart raises, rather than an account of his film choices. Its central character, Hirayama, makes ordinary acts absorbingly watchable. My judgment is that the film earns its comfort through its willingness to leave his happiness incomplete.
Spoiler warning: The discussion below includes family revelations and the final scene of Perfect Days.
Hirayama gives attention a practical purpose
Directed by Wenders and starring Koji Yakusho, Perfect Days follows a Tokyo public-toilet cleaner whose life includes tending plants, listening to cassette tapes, and reading. The film’s official character profiles establish these habits as the foundation of his apparently repetitive existence. [Official character profiles](https://www.perfectdays-movie.jp/cast/)
From Hirayama’s perspective, however, repetition need not mean emptiness. A task can be familiar and still deserve care. Yakusho’s performance makes that distinction persuasive: the character’s reserve leaves room for us to observe how he approaches things, instead of waiting for him to explain what they mean.
This is where the film becomes especially relevant to the exhaustion behind Quart’s subject. Following the news often involves encountering urgent problems over which an individual has little immediate control. Hirayama’s work has a different scale. He can attend to something directly in front of him and finish it. The satisfaction is limited, concrete, and available again tomorrow.
There is an ethical dimension to that attention. A public facility connects strangers who may never meet. Treating its maintenance seriously means doing something useful for people who may never acknowledge the person responsible. For me, that makes the film’s quietness more substantial than a collection of soothing images.
A peaceful routine still has boundaries
The movie becomes more interesting when we stop treating Hirayama as a model of perfect living. His habits can express pleasure, self-respect, and protection at the same time. The question is how much room they leave for someone else.
His niece Niko provides that test. She comes to stay after leaving home, and her presence changes the meaning of his solitude. Later, her mother’s arrival exposes a distance between Hirayama and his family. Two brief lines sharpen these tensions: his sister asks, “Are you really cleaning toilets?”; Hirayama tells Niko, “Next time is next time. Now is now.” Both exchanges are documented in Criterion’s discussion of the film. [Criterion’s essay on Perfect Days](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8536-perfect-days-where-the-light-comes-through)
The sister’s question makes status audible. Work that we have been invited to examine closely suddenly becomes something another person struggles to accept. The scene asks us to notice the gap between knowing how someone spends a day and deciding what that day is worth.
Yet her reaction also prevents Hirayama’s life from becoming an uncomplicated fantasy of simplicity. He has relationships beyond the routines we have learned to recognize. His present does not explain everything about his past, and the film gives us no license to fill those gaps with a definitive diagnosis.
That restraint matters in character analysis. Silence can invite curiosity without supplying proof. Our discussion of how framing shapes judgments about people on screen considers a related problem: viewers can feel certain about motives that the available evidence never establishes.
Niko makes the present something to share
“Now is now” is memorable partly because it sounds so complete. Taken alone, it could become a reassuring maxim. Within the relationship between an uncle and his niece, it also raises a practical question: whose needs does staying in the present serve?
Hirayama can offer Niko his company and his way of looking. He cannot make every uncertainty disappear. From her position, an adult’s settled habits may feel welcoming precisely because her own circumstances are unsettled. Sharing those habits lets her encounter him through experience rather than family assumptions.
The distinction is useful for anyone seeking refuge in movies. A film gives us temporary access to someone else’s priorities. We do not have to adopt them as instructions. We can spend time with a character’s choices, understand their appeal, and still recognize their limitations.
Why small details can hold a whole movie
Perfect Days asks viewers to become interested in variation within familiar actions. That can initially feel demanding if you arrive expecting each scene to deliver a new complication. Gradually, the familiar becomes the basis for noticing a change.
My strongest response to this approach is the freedom it gives ordinary experience from explanation. A person does not need to announce a life lesson every time something moves them. The film’s pauses allow us to consider what an encounter means before a line of dialogue settles the matter.
There is also a limitation worth acknowledging. A beautifully presented routine can make difficult work appear more manageable than many workers experience it. Hirayama’s particular relationship with his job cannot stand in for everyone’s working conditions. The film is most convincing as a portrait of one person, and less useful as a general prescription for contentment.
That qualification strengthens its value as refuge. A movie need not prove that life is fair to make one part of life worth looking at. It can offer a bounded experience whose beauty remains meaningful even when we recognize what lies outside the frame.
The ending refuses to make comfort permanent
The closing passage holds on Hirayama driving as Nina Simone’s recording of “Feeling Good” plays. His expression moves through happiness and distress. Rather than resolving him into a single emotion, the shot makes us stay with their coexistence.
For me, this is the film’s decisive achievement. If it finished by certifying that Hirayama had mastered happiness, everything before it would become a set of instructions. Instead, the ending preserves his vulnerability. The routines have value even though they cannot guarantee how he will feel.
That makes Perfect Days a moving response to the desire Quart’s column identifies. The relief cinema offers can include sadness, ambiguity, and recognition. What changes is our relationship to them: we have time to watch, and someone’s experience becomes more than another demand on our attention.
As our reflection on the companionship readers find in film criticism suggests, returning to movies also means returning to a conversation. We bring different worries each time, and a familiar work can meet them differently.
The deeper promise of Perfect Days is modest enough to trust. Attention cannot settle every conflict or protect us from grief. It can help us recognize a person, a useful act, or a moment of pleasure before it passes. When the headlines become too much, that renewed capacity to notice is a meaningful thing to carry out of the theater.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: October 27, 2026 at 02:09:32 PDT (Los Angeles time)
