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Content Warning: This post includes spoilers for Perfect Days (2023)
Back when Perfect Days was in the cinemas, I watched it multiple times and wasn’t quite sure why I enjoyed it as much as I did. It is a rather simple movie, there isn’t much happening as it’s following the life of the main character while cleaning toilets in Tokyo. Every once and a while there is a new subplot with his niece, a coworkers love story or the owner of the bar that he goes to every week. The one thing that all of these have in common is that they end at some point in the movie. At the end of the movie every storyline is completed and in the past. You seem to know everything that happened during this time, but at the same time, you know almost nothing about the main character.
During the movie we learn that the main character likes to listen to music and likes to read books, spends most of his time alone, following his very strict routine. The aforementioned subplots of the movie, break that routine, although he still tries to stick to it as much as possible. The film can be interpreted as an hommage to the small things in life or just an advertisement about the tokyo toilets (which is why the director was invited to make a movie about them), although I want to focus on the way that the movie plays with information about the main character.
You can probably count the moments where background information about the main character is shown on one hand. We know about his passions, interests and how he spends his day, whats important to him and similar things, but we never discover why. The one main scene where the family of the character is involved, shows us that his dad is still alive, but he doesn’t want to see him, that his sister apparently looks down on him cleaning toilets and that his family is successful. He seems very educated with a large interest in literature, music and nature, which doesn’t really add up with his job of cleaning toilets. We never discover why he chose this life and what happened before that. The plot, which at first seems to completely close all of it’s storylines, ends up leaving a ton of open questions.
If we think about real life and the people in our lives, we usually know a bunch of background things about them, something that we completely miss from the main character in the movie. Where are the differences? In the movie, we see the whole day of the main character with everything he does. Throughout the movie the different days of the week are shown with different activities. In real life we don’t have that. We only see the people when we are together with them. This can be a longer time (with family or colleagues) or a shorter time (in a sports club or at the local cafe). But over time, we end up knowing a lot more about them than about the main character in the movie.
The main difference is that humans are social beings and talk a lot. In real it can happen that a person tells you their whole life story during your first meeting or their relationship drama when you only wanted to buy a drink. This is something that the movie doesn’t do. The main character barely talks, reducing dialogue to only a minimum. He only talks when necessary, which often is a work related reason or direction. The complete lack of “small talk” makes sure that we know almost nothing, we can only assume. For example, we don’t know that he enjoys literature. He reads a book every week, which makes us assume that, but we’ve never heard it first hand from him directly.
To get to know each other we need small talk. I believe that this is something that falls short a lot in the current times, for example during online meetings. They’re usually a lot more efficient than meeting in person, but you end up missing out on the social interaction. You know what you need to do next week, but you don’t know what the latest office gossip is or how your coworkers cat is doing and how they are feeling about it.
But even completely relevants talks in person (like when discussing a topic without doing any small talk) seem to help you get to know the person better. This is also something you can notice in the movie, the other thing it does to hide information from the viewer is to hide emotions. The main character isn’t really emotional and usually doesn’t show emotions. Every time he does, we get some more knowledge about him and his life. He smiles while reading a book? He must enjoy it. He cries after meeting his family? They must be important to him. Things like that are also missing in most online meetings, which makes them even worse.
Personally, I think social interaction is something that falls short in my life. I tend to sit in front of my computer a lot and most of my social interactions are in a chat or online meetings. This is why I try to schedule meetings in person, even though you have to put in a lot more effort to make it work. Travel times, finding a suitable location and being a lot less flexible with presentations and notes, make them very much less efficient, but are essential to work together in a team. I’m currently responsible for organising summer camps for children, where I always want to plan a day or weekend of just fun things for the staff team, so that they get to know each other better and then can work together better. This is a lot more important than you’d first assume, it’s a make it or break it moment for the summer camps.