Take pride in your work!
We follow the most boring man in the world, who works as a toilet cleaner. Every day is the same for him, except for the occasional lucky encounter with someone trying to communicate with him. However, this is not easy, as he doesn’t say much. Will he ever wake up, or has the train left the station? Will he die in a dirty toilet bowl when his time comes?
In the lead role, we find Japan’s best actor, Koji Yakusho. You know you’re in safe hands with this actor, who can’t do anything wrong except be great.
In Perfect Days, he plays a toilet cleaner who lives a mundane life, doing the same things every day. He is a simple man who doesn’t say much, and he is one boring person. But he meets some people who make him open his eyes, which is good for him since he has isolated himself.
Perfect Days is an interesting movie and a character study of a broken man living in the cold society of Japan. He’s a mysterious man because the movie doesn’t give us much backstory, so I wondered if he was a former convict of some sort. But he doesn’t seem to be.
If you hate experiencing the same thing over and over again—watching a man cleaning toilets, drinking soda, and eating—then you might have problems with this movie. But if you give it a chance, you will see that the protagonist gets some wake-up calls when people get closer to him, and he has to get out of his bubble on several occasions. Why has he isolated himself? Well, that’s a question that the movie never answers. But that’s okay since we are following the most boring man played by the greatness, Koji Yakusho.
I like these slow-burning Japanese movies, and I enjoyed Perfect Days. It’s not one of my favorite slow-burning Japanese movies because it becomes repetitive in the first 80 minutes, but then some important characters manage to pop the protagonist’s bubble.
TThe very last scene of the movie is just fantastic and shows us what a great actor Koji Yakusho is. It’s reminiscent of the final scene in Oldboy with the excellent Choi Min-sik. But I have to say that the scene in this movie is even better and much longer. It’s so good and sad, and it will break your heart.