Taking a box cutter and opening a package containing Le Samouraï and Perfect Days, a smile formed across my face. Two films about men who take care of problems. One leaves a mess, while the other scrubs and disinfects. The killer and the cleaner.
The first has a French hitman whose eyes are as piercing as the bullets that explode from his revolver. The second presents us a Japanese cleaner whose eyes are mostly cast down into toilets, unless he’s reading books or looking up into trees when he takes lunch. Composed opposites, yet together they are a tandem of stoicism, and of simple means.
Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï scores a 10 on the coolness scale. But I wouldn’t call it flashy. More suave. Gangster flicks, which rose in popularity during the Great Depression, had heavyweights James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson being boisterous bad guys. Alain Delon’s Jef Costello is a different kind of cat. He doesn’t get easily rattled. When he puts on his signature trench coat and fedora before exiting his spartan apartment to complete a contract kill, it’s with purpose. Melville’s tone and style deconstructs the elements and motifs mostly associated with traditional gangster cinema. In doing so, Melville pulls the wool over our eyes in seeing how others look at Costello. Our audaciously mannered hitman appears too good looking to be a professional assassin. Alas, his killer looks become an asset as he knows how to blend in, distract, and finally complete his assigned job.
Melville also instills a sense of the classic Western even as he operates in an urban sprawl with swanky subterranean jazz clubs. Costello’s business has shared similarities in how gunslingers are sketched in American westerns. At one point, Costello goes to collect his fee and finds himself on a bridge with another man standing there to kill him. The distance separating them is like what you’d see outside a saloon; two men readying their pistols. All that was missing was a small tumbleweed rolling across the screen.
By the time we get to the finale, the film has taken a circuitous path in telling a simple plot. Where some might feel it meanders in reaching its destination, the route allows us to see Jef’s humanity and realize his coda. And while he is doomed the moment a witness catches his eye after a murder, there is no existential crisis just an inevitability.
Le Samouraï’s abrupt stoppage feels like whiplash. Casual but unexpected. Costello is dispatched with his integrity intact, and Melville reaches FIN in unforgettable fashion.
Jean-Pierre Melville’s neo-noir, having pirouetted around gangster film norms with its western flourishes, makes its arrival on 4K Blu-ray with a new digital restoration undertaken by Criterion and Pathé from the original 35mm camera negative, in addition to a 35mm internegative and interpositive for some sections. Mostly noticeable in certain transitions. The supplemental material retains features found on the previous 2017 Blu-ray. They include 2005 archival interviews with critics Rui Nogueira and Ginette Vincendeau; Olivier Bohler’s 2011 documentary “Melville-Delon: D’honneur et de nuit (Of Honor and Of Night)”; archival interviews with Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Delon, Nathalie Delon, Francois Perier, and Catrhy Rosier; and a booklet containing an essay (“Death in White Gloves”) by film scholar David Thomson, “The Melville Style” from John Woo (director of Hard-Boiled), and an excerpt from Rui Nogueira’s interview with Melville (“Melville on Le Samouraï”).
Now it is time to talk about the cleaner. Wim Wenders’ drama Perfect Days is about a man who cleans toilets around Tokyo’s Shibuya ward. Being cheeky, I remarked to others that the film was about a “stoic cleaning toilets.” Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) is very reserved but with the expressive countenance of a man who does enjoy life’s little wonders. The play of sunlight cascading through trees overhead. A song with a lyric where everything feels good. Eating at your favorite local restaurant.
Hirayama has his daily rituals, and it is through routine he finds purpose. Routine shouldn’t be viewed as mundane or with a sense of complacency. Routine offers consistency and through consistency comes improvement.
Perfect Days is a two-hour mediation where its lyrical depth is found in its repetition. Just like Le Samouraï, Wenders begins with Hirayama starting his day. Costello smokes a cigarette while we listen to his bird chirp and the sounds of cars passing through puddles of water. Hirayama awakens to street sounds of a neighbor sweeping before he stows his floor mattress away and sprays water on his plants. The liturgical rhythm of his actions offers calm. Him gazing up into the sky during lunch offers a break from a reality where his face isn’t angled down as he cleans. Compare that to his assistant Takashi (Tokio Emoto); part of a younger generation eager to gaze down at their phones and ignore their surroundings.
The film is a portrait of faith where Wenders views Hirayama as a monk and the stalls he cleans as small temples. Hirayama probably didn’t envision this life for himself, and yet it is a beautiful rendering of grace. Each day is routine until it isn’t. Those delightful surprises – like playing a game of Tic-tac-toe with a complete stranger after finding a piece of a paper hidden in a stall – are interludes that make Hirayama more appreciative of what life presents. When his niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano), shows up unannounced it signals change and entreats Hirayama to different experiences. Not all of them good or happy. But through change comes growth. Crying inconsolably after seeing his wealthy estranged sister again, Hirayama meets a moribund stranger making peace with his ex-wife. The two drink and convalesce before parting ways never to see each other again. The scene reminded me of those times in my life where I stop being an introvert and engage with a complete stranger while traveling. Those few minutes of talking may not amount to much but could shake you out of your routine, if just for a moment.
The Criterion Collection release of Perfect Days is very in tune with its protagonist. Special features are sparse but keep the focus on the film. Through a series of interviews with Wenders, actor Koji Yakusho, and producer Koji Yanai (founder of the Tokyo Toilet project), we are treated to the director recalling his introduction to Japanese cinema (through the films of Yasujirō Ozu) and the distinctions that define Yakusho in comparison to his character Hirayama. Other features include the trailer and a 2023 short by Wenders (“some body comes into the light”) featuring an interpretive dance by Min Tanaka. Tanaka appears in Perfect Days as a homeless man.
In reading Bilge Ebiri’s accompanying essay “Where the Light Comes Through,” Wenders and cinematographer Franz Lustig shot the film, handheld, in sixteen days with little preparation. The shots linger with each scene and a stillness that transfixes. A towering achievement when you consider its subject is not one that screams “cinematic.” But cinema is more than visual and aural stimulation – though Hirayama’s love of music cassettes affords many great needle drops. The ability to be moved, to have meaning. Great cinema can do this.
Perfect Days embraces the quotidian details of life and simplicity. Not every day is perfect. Just that what’s now is now.
Le Samouraï:
Grade: A-
Perfect Days:
Grade: A+
