🌳🍿 Perfect Days

A man in Tokyo cleans public toilets for a living, and does it properly. He wakes, waters his plants, drives to work with a cassette playing, photographs the light through one tree at lunch, reads at night. Small things interrupt the routine and it holds.

Sunday matinee at 🪩 The Tannery Cinema, thirty-three degrees outside, three weeks into what I had been calling 🕯️ The flat weeks.

I expected a film about humility and got a film about attention. He is not resigned to his days; he is interested in them. The routine is not a cage he has accepted. It is the thing that lets him notice the tree.

• The work is shown in full, without irony. Nobody learns a lesson about it.
• He owns almost nothing and chooses every item of it.
• The last shot is a face doing several things at once, for a long time. I have no summary of it.

Walked home the long way. First afternoon in weeks that I did not check how I felt.

Watched With: Jonas Reuter

• The morning sequence, repeated four times and never the same twice.
• The lunch bench: the camera, the tree, the stranger he nods to.
• The niece: an uncle and a niece on bicycles on a bridge, in no hurry about anything.
• The drive at the end.