“Perfect Days” Movie Review

Substack podcast-style reading here.

I’ve always found it easy to agree with the guidance that, “How you do one thing is how you do everything,” since it follows that a starting point of generosity or self-interest, curiosity or assumptions, engagement or laziness, will issue energy in similar form.

In turn, no act becomes too small or large, as consistency in the places one chooses to act from grows a frame on which anything we do speaks to, then builds, on cores of service or exploitation, gratitude or prejudice.

Case in point: in Wim Wenders’ 2023 film, “Perfect Days,” I find no shortage of meaning in the fact that the launch of The Tokyo Toilet project served as the instigator for one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

The project, seeing its first of 17 toilets to date installed in 2020, was launched as a public-service effort to bring aesthetics and altruism to a problem as long-standing as any in human society.

The results have given the world a joyful approach to a need that, on paper, seems hard to be beat when it comes to the mundane.

Even so, every community has had to deal with the unavoidable issue of excrement in a way that preserves health and, ideally, holds discretion around a very private matter.