Perfect, ordered, repeated, geometric, marked, ordinary days.
Habit as a slow and economical choice. How to renounce excesses, the superfluous, the vain. Apparently empty and silent hours in which, Candiani would say, silence is alive and the void is a full whole. Routine as recognizable certainties, cardinal points on which to build a path towards the awareness that everything is out of our control except the present moment. Now is now. In repeated actions, on days that are always the same, making room for even a detail to change and surprise us while it seems that nothing changes but 'if nothing ever changed it would be truly absurd'.
Organize the days in small gestures to be able to direct attention circularly from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside, in a virtuosity that is almost a dance. An ecstatic and non-aesthetic choreography, proceeding with slow and soft steps towards a knowledge that is a return to the essence and the essential. To experience first-hand what it means to be alive and alive. Here and now. And don't end up living without knowing anything because we already knew, from the beginning: we are all there is to know. Each is a small part of the whole that belongs to that whole and that that whole contains.
The extremely cinematic direction of images that move and speak without words by Wenders and the silent interpretation of Kōji Yakusho which, turned towards the interiority of the protagonist character, restores an all-round sculptural body and psychology, make Perfect days a meditative film. The spectator is accompanied in a two-hour mindfulness practice in which the images are a mantra, a song that anchors the attention to the present moment, to that hic et nunc in which the unrepeatability of the theatrical art that it shares echoes, absurdly. that moment, always the same and therefore always different, with the art of life. A film that is a practice of Aparigraha: letting go to be.
(For those who have read it, it is difficult not to find in the protagonist of Wenders' film the same intentions or the same approach to existence as Michel Simonet's philosopher-sweeper 'with the rose').