“Perfect Days is as close as I ever got to making a statement on peace.” — Wim Wenders, to me in 2023
Last year, as I did my standard preparation for an interview, I discovered one of the most intriguing bits of research I’d ever come across. In a twenty-year-old clip made available on YouTube, Palme d’Or-winning director Wim Wenders discusses notions of violence and peace in cinema:
I saw reflections of each concept in a pair of movies he made in 2023. His documentary Anselm (available on the Criterion Channel), the main movie we discussed, paints a dynamic portrait of an artist who — like Wenders — provides the space to contextualize violence and explain why it occurs.
But his other film, Perfect Days (available on Hulu), provides its inverse with a “peace cinema.” This film is meant to be genre-less — and might even be boring — as it tries to make the concept of peace into something attractive and appealing for an audience to consume. I’d say he succeeds wildly with this tender tale of a Tokyo toilet cleaner, the steadfast Hirayama, who finds a kind of spiritual uplift from his structured life.
It’s the kind of movie that makes you ask how much you really need to be happy. Wenders does not make any absolutist declarations that one must live an ascetic lifestyle, for example, to attain this sense of satisfaction. But Perfect Days stresses the value of ritualization and regularity to give our lives a sense of purpose and meaning beyond the relentless pursuit of more. The perfect days of the film’s title are not out in the distance attached to some outcome of our labor but right in front of us, should we cultivate the mindset to claim them.
I asked Wenders if Perfect Days represents a peace cinema, and he gave one of my favorite responses I’ve ever received in an interview. Continuing from the quote at the top of the newsletter, he replied:
For me, one of the big conditions of peace is being content with what you have. One of the big troubles with peace is that our countries and economies are addicted to growth. Growth creates wars. Growth creates inequality. Growth creates those who cannot grow, as opposed to those who always want to continue to grow. Growth is a huge obstacle to peace. Our economists do not like to hear that. They don’t want to hear that we shouldn’t be happy with what we have and try to share it instead of growing more. Growing more is only possible at the expense of others who will grow less, and that’s the reason for most wars. Hirayama is a real peacemaker. He’s my first real peace hero…
With Perfect Days entering the Criterion Collection this week, it felt right to curate a list of peace cinema. There is one overlapping title with this list and my pick-me-up movies post from January…
…but I don’t want to give the impression that these two things are synonymous. Joy and peace are related — cousins, perhaps — but not the same. The peace cinema described by Wenders is comfortable dwelling in the undeniable reality that we will encounter pain and suffering. But these films do not buy into the Horatio Alger-tinged mythology that, with perseverance, we can outwork negative outcomes. Appreciation, not accomplishment, is the aim of peace cinema.
Peace cinema tends not to follow strictly goal-driven linear plots, instead mirroring the cyclical rhythms of the everyday. In place of relentless forward motion, their protagonists seek reconciliation across stages of life. If these films have antagonists, it's the cruel march of time or the force of nature rather than an individual avatar for avarice. They prioritize satisfaction, not achievement; an outlook, not an outcome. The place they end up doesn't have to be new — just their attitude. And in these masterfully modulated films, that’s more than enough for entertainment and enlightenment.
Another Year, available to rent from various digital platforms
The four seasons of a year constitute the chapters of Mike Leigh’s Another Year, one of the British director and dramatist’s most astutely observed chronicles of life passing by. Married couple Tom and Gerri (get it!?) provide a sense of stability for a coterie of friends who have not quite found their groove, most notably the volatile and vulnerable Mary (Lesley Manville). The film is not just a simplistic endorsement of adhering to well-defined structures and routines, though. Leigh often shows how the dynamic duo’s deep-rootedness leads them to respond inadequately to the needs of others out of worry they might upset their equilibrium. But they clearly have something figured out because the seasons will once again turn, and Tom and Gerri are the likeliest to greet the repetition with a grin rather than a groan.
Blue, YouTube
I cannot say I’ve ever encountered anything quite like Derek Jarman’s avant-garde Blue. It’s less a movie and more of a portal into a liminal state of consciousness. The film is 73 minutes of a single visual: the color blue. If you’ve ever stood in front of a Rothko painting and let it work on your perception, picture that but on steroids as Jarman injects sound into his experiential collage. His work meditates on all the meaning inherent in the color blue to open up a discussion on life and death. Jarman made the film as he knew he was slipping away to AIDS, and the film has the quality of existing in all verb tenses at once. While perhaps scary to contemplate what awaits us on the other side, there’s something deeply calming — dare I say, peaceful — about sharing the moment in artistic communion with Jarman and feeling like some thread still ties us together.
Columbus, available to rent from various digital platforms
I will not claim to be as gaga for Columbus as some friends; the people who love this movie absolutely love it. But I still found Kogonada’s debut feature an entirely wholesome and wonderful experience because of the way it manages to transmit the sense of serenity its characters feel. As a Korean-American man (John Cho) comes home to attend to his ailing father, he strikes up an unexpected friendship with a librarian (Haley Lu Richardson, pre-Portia) over their shared interest in the titular Indiana town’s architecture. There are no expectations or boxes for their budding relationship to fit into, and Kogonada never puts pressure on it to build into anything. It’s just a film content to marvel at structures that sprout up and flourish in unexpected places, be they man-made or made between men and women.
Late Spring, Max and Criterion Channel
There had to be at least one film on the list from Japanese master Yasujirō Ozu, the artist who so directly inspired Wenders’ style and sensibility. His tidily composed frames and emotionally attuned storytelling style laid the groundwork for peace cinema. If you’re looking for a place to start within his vast body of work, Late Spring would be an ideal entry point. Ideas about growth, change, and stability are built into the very fabric of this story as 27-year-old Noriko wants to preserve the sense of satisfaction she feels tending to her widowed father Shukichi. He, on the other hand, begins to believe he must release her from these duties into marriage so she can know a different flavor of contentment. Ozu tests Shukichi’s thesis that “happiness isn’t something you wait around for, it’s something you create yourself” by gauging the possibility of growth without change.
Paterson, Amazon Prime Video
Here’s the crossover between peace cinema and pick-me-up movies. Jim Jarmusch’s gentle Paterson chronicles a week in the life of Adam Driver’s titular poet/bus driver in the titular New Jersey town. There’s no grumbling about wanting to quit his day job so he can focus on his writing like many a struggling artist film does. Instead, Jarmusch highlights the way he keeps his creative juices flowing while observing the vast swaths of humanity he ferries to their destination. The routinization of his life is not an impediment to his poetry but an inspiration for it, the very fuel he needs for the long haul of translating human experience into text. It’s a film that has very much become a model for my method of thinking about how writing and work can coexist.
Showing Up, Paramount+
The opportunity to talk to Kelly Reichardt about her warm, witty, and wise film Showing Up came along at an opportune time as I struggled with some corporate drama. Rather than try to summarize why I resonated so deeply with this tale of a creator trying to clear space to do the things that give her life meaning, I’ll turn it over to Reichardt herself. Maybe it’s what you need to hear, too.
“We wanted to focus on what if there’s not a built-in audience for what you make, but you still have the compulsion. It’s not a financially driven thing at all. I have the impulse to want to work every day and make something. That’s what balances my life. That’s what we’re focused on: people that want to have that impulse and want to make things.
[…] You still need to fill that void of time. It doesn’t get rid of the compulsion to want to make things. How do you balance making stuff with your life and all the things that can distract you from doing [art]? Even when there’s not a pending show, what’s the reason to get to the table every day when it’s hard?”
Soul, Disney+
Pixar’s Soul confronts a deeply difficult question: how can you convince someone that life is worth living? I won’t spoil how or what jazz musician Joe comes to learn in his journey to and from the afterlife, but we can all stand to heed the lesson that it’s possible to find happiness apart from your “spark” in the world. We can get it from simple things like helping people and feeling a deep connection with those we cherish. I shed many a tear as the artfully delivered message of Soul hit me in, well, a part of my soul that few movies have such extensive, compassionate reach to find.
The Straight Story, Disney+
David Lynch’s The Straight Story is probably the most strictly linear film on this list. Elderly Iowan Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) wants to go visit his estranged brother in Wisconsin before he passes away, and with his driver’s license gone, he has no choice but to get on board his John Deere tractor for the 240-mile ride. There’s a goal in sight and a ticking timer on his journey, yet Lynch’s recounting feels largely episodic in nature as he encounters and transforms the many people he meets on the road. (As a 7-year-old who forced my parents to take me to this at a now-defunct Houston arthouse theater, I count myself among them.) His constancy and steadfastness light the way along the path to reconciliation. While circumstances might affect the frequency with which we relate to family members, The Straight Story radiates the true and undying love that nothing can extinguish.
Yi Yi, Criterion Channel
Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang takes us through it all with the multigenerational Jian family in Yi Yi. A year of their life in Taipei begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral. The film just seems to capture and contain everything in a way that is tough to explain but tender to experience. “I want to tell people things they don't know,” says the aspiring young artist Yang-Yang at the film’s close, “Show them stuff they haven't seen.” Yang both does and doesn’t fulfill this charge, but the latter outcome is far from a failure. On the one hand, the Jian’s trials and tribulations ring largely familiar as the stuff of domestic dramas we all experience. But to know that someone else on the other side of the world goes through these same travails and life continues… that’s special, too. Sometimes we need to be told by art because we hear but we don’t know.
Here’s a real “pinch me” interview: I talked with Martin Scorsese’s longtime editor and closest collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker for Slant Magazine. It was not a chat explicitly about the films they made together but rather a look at her ex-husband Michael Powell’s life and work with his filmmaking partner Emeric Pressburger. She executive produced a documentary that David Hinton, also part of the conversation, directed and Scorsese narrated. It’s the best crash course in film history you’re likely to receive from a doc, so keep an eye out for it!
Paying subscribers also got this personal reflection on Almost Famous in their inboxes last weekend:
You can keep track of all the freelance writing I’ve done this year through this list on Letterboxd.
You can always keep up with my film-watching in real-time on the app Letterboxd. I’ve also compiled every movie I’ve ever recommended through this newsletter via a list on the platform as well.
You best believe I was blasting Hirayama’s cassette tapes from Perfect Days while writing this newsletter!
I was deep in surfing music as I tried to finish my book club’s assigned reading, Barbarian Days, and this is the best earworm of the bunch:
Not enough of the New York Times’ list of the 100 best books of the 21st century! You can tell I’m a movie guy because I’ve only read 10 of these. (If you’re a big bibliophile, please let me know which of these I should prioritize! I have Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow on loan from the library.)
Anyways, as an addendum to the Shelley Duvall obituary I shared last week, I’d recommend reading this beautiful conversation in Texas Monthly with the person who went from fan to friend of the late actress in recent years.
Also, after watching A Family Affair on Netflix, I did have to go get the answer to this question: “Why Does Everything On Netflix Look Like That?”
See you again this weekend with another Criterion-related newsletter!
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall