CHRISTIE PITS park
Sunday, August 18, 2024

perfect days

With the short films Mobilize and Cutaway

German master filmmaker Wim Wenders and Japanese screenwriter Takuma Takasaki’s unexpectedly charming, funny, and touching Perfect Days invites us into the workdays of the custodians who give Japan its unparalleled reputation for cleanliness. The film follows the daily routines of Hirayama (Cannes-winning Best Actor Koji Yakusho), a man who works cleaning public toilets in parks across Tokyo. Hirayama finds small joys throughout his work day – including taking photographs of trees, helping a lost child, playing tic-tac-toe, tolerating his young coworker’s flights of fancy, and blasting American rock ‘n roll on cassette tapes in his work van between jobs – but at the end of the day, his job is simply his job, a small feature of his rich life. Though the film is structured as a series of repetitive daily routines, no day is really the same as the one before, with subtle and abrupt changes alike giving meaning not only to Hirayama’s work, but also to our own lives. Perfect Days stuns as an engaging rumination on the dignity of work and the art of everyday life.

Like Perfect Days, this programme’s two short films elevate work from the mundane to the transcendent. Caroline Monnet’s Mobilize deftly re-edits archival footage of Indigenous work and ways of life from the NFB archive. Monnet’s montage rhythmically reveals the tension between colonial depictions of Indigenous peoples and efforts by Indigenous artists to accurately depict modern Indigenous life – all without a single line of spoken dialogue. Similarly, Toronto filmmaker Kazik Radwanski’s Cutaway narrates the day-to-day labour of a construction worker and his after-hours relationships with women entirely through close-ups of human hands and without dialogue. Both Mobilize and Cutaway are engrossing formalist meditations on the place of work in our everyday lives.