Perfect Days

Same team as Anselm: Wim Wenders and Franz Lustig. (Which post I see is still in drafts…)

Beautiful and didactively clever. A series of days in the life of a toilet cleaner (Kōji Yakusho, as Hirayama), each of which has different things happening, some nice, some less so, but, as the beaming face of our hero tells us in the last shots, all perfect.

It’s nicely constructed: the first day takes 30 minutes, the second 15, the third and fourth complete the hour. Then there’s the eponymous Lou Reed song. After that first hour the structure inevitably becomes more fluid.

Wicked Little Letters

An apparent (more or less) true story about the rocking of Littlehampton by a series of foul-mouthed hate letters; the culprit was finally identified as one of the recipients. Olivia Colman’s nice portrait of a repressed woman’s poisonous verbal escape vent. Funny and convincing.

What’s best though is the character of Rose Gooding (played by Jessie Buckley). She’s an outsider – Irish – and doesn’t care a hoot about the social conventions which govern Littlehampton, and Edith Swan (Colman’s character) in particular. She’s a single-parent, but most relevantly is a potty-mouthed joyous swearer – and hence is the prime suspect in the case of the sweary letters.

How they are related

Hirayama and Rose are the goodies here: both unrelentingly positive about life, not letting things get to them. They’re different: Hirayama rejoices in service – cleaning people’s toilets – Rose in just the sheer abandon of living life to the full. But they are top-class exempla.