• Courtesy Of Neon
• Koji Yakusho plays a toilet cleaner with impeccable musical taste in Wim Wenders' drama about everyday transcendence.

Of the five Oscar nominees for Best International Feature Film, one is in local theaters (The Zone of Interest), one is on Netflix (Society of the Snow), and three aren't available to watch here at press time — unless you catch Perfect Days at the White River Indie Film Festival in White River Junction on Saturday, February 17, at 3 p.m. This meditative drama set in Tokyo marks an acclaimed comeback for Wim Wenders, director of Wings of Desire and Pina.

The deal

It's a normal weekday for Hirayama (Koji Yakusho). He wakes at the break of dawn in his bachelor apartment, rolls up his futon, brushes his teeth, mists the maple saplings he painstakingly grows in jars and gets in his van. Driving through the still-quiet city, he listens to his beloved vintage cassette tapes: Lou Reed, Otis Redding, Patti Smith, Nina Simone. Then he parks the van, unpacks his supplies and gets to work cleaning the public toilets of Tokyo.

Will you like it?

I'm not sure who writes the capsule film descriptions on the Internet Movie Database, but Perfect Days has one of my favorites in recent memory: "A janitor in Japan drives between jobs listening to rock music."

If that doesn't entice you, rest assured that Perfect Days is about a lot more than watching some guy commute. Yet, on another level, the summary hits the mark, because Wenders' film is ultimately about the mundane patterns that make a life worth living.

A reference to the Lou Reed song "Perfect Day," the title isn't even a little ironic. While other characters occasionally express pity for the solitary, hardworking existence of sixtysomething Hirayama, the movie itself (scripted by Wenders and Takuma Takasaki) portrays him as the opposite of a figure of pathos. True, the film is wordless for its first 10 minutes — until Hirayama's feckless young coworker, Takashi (Tokio Emoto), arrives and starts chattering at the silent Hirayama. But, in his taciturn way, our protagonist is a happy man.

It might help that the toilets he spends his days sanitizing aren't exactly your average johns. Perfect Days emerged from an art project called the Tokyo Toilet, whose organizers invited Wenders to document 16 artists' redesign of public facilities in the Shibuya area of Tokyo. There's a space-age WC, one that looks like a high-rise elevator, a sylvan one adorned with rough-hewn wooden slabs and one that has transparent walls until the occupant flips a switch. ("How the hell does this work?" a frustrated woman asks Hirayama.)

The tour of these toilets, combined with the classic needle drops and the dreamy skyline views of Tokyo, might be enough to hold our attention. But Perfect Days does more than accompany Hirayama on his routines; we also watch subtle currents of conflict swell and dissipate in his life. When Takashi suggests he sell the now-trendy analog cassettes, Hirayama must maintain their friendship without parting with his treasures. When Hirayama's teenage niece, Niko (Arisa Nakano), arrives for a surprise visit, he quickly figures out she's run away from home and has to address the situation.

These younger characters may fret about the future, but Hirayama lives in the present, serving in his unfussy way as an exemplar of mindfulness. "Next time is next time," he tells Niko firmly when she tries to nail him down to a plan. "Now is now." On his lunch break, he communes with and photographs trees, which serve as a visual motif throughout the film, cross-fading in black and white in his nightly dreams. Stay through the end credits, and you'll learn that komorebi is the Japanese word for "sunlight filtered through leaves."

One could argue that Wenders leans a little too hard on another motif: the generation gap. Young Takashi uses grating variations on the phrase "10 out of 10" in more than half of his lines. When Niko hears "Brown Eyed Girl" in her uncle's car, she asks if the song is on Spotify; he asks her what Spotify is. There's one shot that is practically an op-ed: Niko snaps a selfie while Hirayama aims his camera upward at the trees, one of them seeking transcendence in nature while the other documents herself, lost in the online echo chamber.

Despite these fleeting hints of "old man yells at cloud," Perfect Days as a whole shares Hirayama's generous openness to experience, his productive silence. This janitor is also an artist and a less obnoxious heir to Ferris Bueller, wordlessly telling us to stop hustling and look around once in a while — at a tree, a cast of light or, yes, even an exceptionally beautiful toilet.

If you like this, try...

Four Daughters (2023; playing at WRIF on Saturday, February 17, 6 p.m.): After Perfect Days, catch one of the nominees for the Best Documentary Feature Film Oscar, which uses an innovative format to tell the story of a Tunisian mother reeling from the loss of two of her daughters to radical religious movements.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023; playing at WRIF on Saturday, February 17, 8:30 p.m.): If the title of this unusual coming-of-age tale from Québécois director Ariane Louis-Seize doesn't sell you on it, nothing will.

Cure (1997; rentable): Yakusho has an impressive filmography that includes Tampopo, Babel, 13 Assassins, the original version of Shall We Dance? and several films by my favorite Japanese horror director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, such as this one, in which he plays a detective investigating a string of bizarre murders.