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Perfect Days (2023)
Another brick in the construction of today's humanity: lifeless creatures
Yesterday I went with some friends to see Perfect Days (2023) in a small, empty cinema. The film tells us about the daily life of a happy and wise person who goes through life without making any compromises.
This person is nothing less than an angel, but an angel who hasn't come down to earth, who hasn't got dirty and who, on the contrary, has settled into a life of urban routine, with the comforts of doing a job very well, great literature, alcohol and a certain asexual voyeurism.
This character is the aggregation of two that those who have seen a few films may remember: the angel who appears at the beginning of 'Wings of Desire' (1987) talking to the other angel who will abdicate, mixed with those fat humans who don't move in 'WALL-E' (2008).
The result is the opposite of the main character in the first film mentioned, also by this director. The conclusion that the director betrayed himself by making a film now in his old age that is morally opposite to the one he made at the age of 40 would be false. What happens is that both there and here he is just a sounding board for the world.
It's the experience of the world that has changed, today 30-year-olds will find in the character in Perfect Days a superego, which was rarely the case in the previous generation. Paradoxically, today in this world of old people, very well predicted by the character in Stalker (1979), it's the old people who could still tell us how they lived and everything that happened to them, because living is better than dreaming (Elis Regina). That's what Win Wenders doesn't do and that's why he's not innocent.
Technically, the film has all the necessary artifice to work as a printing machine for the future: set in Japan to be verisimilar to our prosaic Western eyes, with a narrative line as flat as the ECG of a non-beating heart, with beautiful music that feels global rather than regional (the transcription of House Of The Rising Sun is perhaps the film's highlight), with one or two flaws to keep the aficionados enthused - the angle of a scene on the way out of the house near the end, the lack of a haiku at the end - and finally without any traces of poo or pee that could remind us of our animality.