perfect days
on friday night i watched perfect days (2023). danny borrowed the dvd from the library about a month ago (he's become a "physical media sicko" and tbh i'm tempted to join him) and i've been waiting to be in the right mood to watch it. from the little i'd seen and heard of it (trailer + danny loved it + flan loved it) i had a feeling it would have a big impact on me and i wanted to set aside a quiet evening for it.
all i can say is… holy crap.
(spoilers ahead!)
it feels a little funny to talk about this movie because so much of it passes wordlessly. a shot of leaves rustling overhead; a black and white video collage of dreams; a close-up of koji yakusho's expression as he drives to work. yakusho's character, hirayama, says very little. he's so quiet in fact that when other characters speak, it feels a bit ridiculous – like, did you really have to say all that?
i loved and felt so moved by hirayama's way of moving through the world. he is very attached to his routine, serious and meticulous about his work, but at the same time he has this strong current of curiosity and playful openness. he plays a long game of asynchronous tic-tac-toe with an unknown stranger on a piece of paper stuffed into a corner of a toilet stall; he greets respectfully a homeless man who poses like a tree; he busts out laughing to himself in the car after a dramatic encounter with his silly coworker in a record store; he plays shadow tag with a man dying of cancer.
– god, that shadow scene. i was already feeling emotional earlier on in the movie, something bubbling under the surface either from my life or the general vibes that emerged in physical form when i looked down at bug snuggled up against me on the couch and started sobbing thinking about how one day he's going to die (i had to pause the movie for a bit because of this). but the shadow scene really fucked me up.
basically, hirayama goes to his favorite bar and happens upon the barkeep ("mama") embracing a man, and later that night encounters that man again on a pathway by the water. the man turns out to be the barkeep's ex-husband, who is dying of cancer and wanted to see his ex-wife again, ostensibly to make amends but mostly, he says, just because he wanted to see her. he is reflecting out loud to hirayama about his life, and then he says – i am paraphrasing bc i don't remember exactly – "do shadows get darker when they overlap? …ah, there's still so much i don't know. i guess that's how life ends."
i found that so profoundly sad i just started crying uncontrollably. to think that we have so little time on this earth relative to all the interesting, beautiful, strange things there are to be discovered within it, so many things to understand and people to know.
but then hirayama says to the man, "why don't we find out?". he bounds up a couple stairs to a spot under the bridge with a streetlamp, his shadow emerging on the stones beneath him, and gestures at the man to join him. they analyze the shadows for a time and determine that overlapping ones don't in fact get darker. then hirayama challenges the man to a game of shadow tag and soon they're running and flailing around like kids, laughing.
the saddest things in life sit side-by-side with the most joyous. pain and laughter, facing your impending death and playing shadow tag with a stranger. to live is to hold all of these things at the same time.
i felt confused by the vibes of the last scene, the "feeling good" needle drop and abrupt blast of sound. the long shot of hirayama's face was mesmerizing, contorting back and forth between smiling and crying, but i thought it felt incongruous with the song. danny and i talked about it after, though, and he said that he saw that scene as exactly what i was just describing: hirayama attempting to hold both his grief and happiness, attempting to feel them both. maybe that'll hit me more squarely the next time i watch this.
there's much more i could say about perfect days but i think i'll leave it here for now.
earlier today in the park