It was like something in a movie! So… what is that something?
Movie events vs. non-movie events
From Perfect Days directed by Wim Wenders, Screenplay Takuma Takasaki, Cinematography Franz Lustig (Picture from Free Stone Productions Co.)
A lot of people now equate drama with sensational incident, such as someone getting killed. But that’s not drama; it’s a freak occurrence… Instead I think drama is something without sensational incident, something you can’t easily put into words, with the characters saying everyday things like ‘Is that right?’ ‘Yes, it is,’ ‘So that’s what happened.’
Yasujirō Ozu.
I was recently taking part in a dinner conversation, perfectly congenial, agreeable, indeed enjoyable, in which someone around the table said they’d just seen the worst movie ever. They couldn’t believe how bad it was. Terrible! A disaster!
Somehow, some sixth sense alerted me. Uh-oh! I thought. This is sure to a film I love!
What was it? I asked, fearing the worst.
Then it came. As I feared: the worst.
Perfect Days, they said.
What? I thought. Why? I said.
Nothing happens! they replied.
But everything happens, I replied, finding the conversation had moved on while I was gathering my thoughts — as is invariably the case. But I need time to think, I reflected, wondering, as ever, why others don’t.
When, in life, something out of the ordinary occurs, something extreme, sudden, traumatic — a dangerous accident say, an act of violence, a crime in broad daylight, when moments we witness seem go go into a cinematic slo-mo — people often comment that it was like something out of a movie! In other words, things that happen in films aren’t generally things that happen in daily life. The former have to be ‘action-packed’, involve injury, death, or worse.
And things that happen in daily life don’t happen in movies because that would supposedly make for a boring film.
And this, I think, is what my friend meant… there’s nothing in that film, were it to happen in our everyday existence, that might prompt the like something out of a movie comment. The cleaning of public toilets as a daily routine, protagonist Hirayama’s job, is hardly likely to feature in the next Fast and Furious (even if Dan Casey, screenwriter of the last F&F is, as I can attest, as acutely aware of the nuances of humdrum human drama, of quiet subtext as anyone… or he was with his peers in our classroom).
Is this all a matter of genre, perhaps? In genre, in the sense of the term that suggests heightened drama in which the narrative observes particular conventions and tropes — whether merely regurgitating, or preferably subverting, reinventing them, or perhaps commenting on them obliquely or ironically — in genre we expect to find those somethings that happen in movies. (Okay — maybe not in all such genre, romcoms, for example.)
Such events become matters of life and death, literally. The stakes couldn’t be higher, the action — usually a euphemism for violence — more physically dynamic, more explosive. But this is the stuff of dreams and nightmares too, of our primal instincts, fears and desires, of myth throughout history the world over. So it doesn’t mean that such fare denotes vacuous sensationalism. (In my eyes, I admit, it too often does.) Of course, to our shame, we often enjoy seeing others suffer pain, as the culture of badass reveals. There can be no festival without cruelty, Nietzsche reminds us. Indeed, we don’t have public executions in the US (yet) but we don’t need them while we have movies and TV to feast on.
But back to the dramatic register of a film, like my friend’s disliked Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, like Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun, like the cinema of Ozu, or much of that of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh.
The register of the drama may be less pronounced but the emotions can be as intense, more intense even than those of the escapist mayhem of the action movie. The life and death stakes may be figurative rather than literal. There may crisis of a character’s sense of meaning rather than a threat to their mortality — but what is life without meaning?
And there may of course be cruelty — psychological, emotional, unthinking, deliberate. There may be extreme events too, although these more usually occur offscreen, be reported, at the most out of shot and only heard. Even if they are profoundly painful, life-changing, there is little melodrama about them. They are what they are. They feel the way they feel. Grief, longing, rejection, betrayal, love — no need for bombast to convey the deepest aspects of being alive.
In Perfect Days there’s a theft (of a cassette tape), nightly dreams, an unexpected guest, a father (unseen) with developing dementia, a coming death, and daily public toilet cleaning. There’s getting up in the morning and going to sleep at night.
All of this amounts to perfect cinema. Yet there’s nothing here like something in a movie.
And it’s a film I love.
Peter Markham
June 2024