We have to think of Hirayama as a happy person. His life in Tokyo follows a strict routine. Awakened by the morning sun, he rolls his bed neatly into the corner of a small duplex apartment and performs the morning toilet in front of a narrow mirror that doesn't even show his whole face. Then he wets small maple seedlings with water mist. A smile flits across his face. It will find itself in his eyes again and again throughout the day, although one might succumb to the false assumption that there is little in one's life to be happy about. Hirayama's expression proves the contrary when the cassette in his car plays "House of the Rising Sun" while driving through Tokyo at dawn, when he has to wait briefly in front of the public toilets he is supposed to clean because someone urgently wants to use a booth, when the wind blows through the leaves of the trees and casts shadow patterns on the concrete walls during this waiting. And he smiles when he finds a piece of paper with a circle in the three-match grid behind a toilet mirror and adds a cross. He does not want to get in touch with the unknown person, he is not lonely. For him, it's all about the gesture, about the confidence in interpersonal relationships.

Maria Wiesner

Coordinator "Style".

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Hirayama doesn't waste many words in all this, yes: he answers his colleague's questions only with a nod of his head. He does his cleaning work as a Buddhist meditation exercise. Wim Wenders' film "Perfect Days" (whose eponymous Lou Reed song we hear once as skyscrapers pass by the car window) only interrupts the quiet narrative flow when Hirayama goes to bed. Then, in coarse-grained black-and-white shots, memories flit by, lines from the Faulkner book that the protagonist reads before falling asleep, outlines of the maple leaves he lovingly cherishes, the face of his niece, who one day sits on his doorstep after an argument with her mother.

Their appearance will briefly turn the rehearsed routine upside down. But then she asks her uncle to take her to his work and slowly understands why he can't get along with her mother anymore. The siblings have chosen different lives, different worlds, Hirayama will explain to her niece on a bike ride through Tokyo. And he doesn't say much more about it. His life as he has arranged it is enough for him. He advises his niece to live in the moment: "Now is now".

Wenders' luck is Kōji Yakusho. He plays the taciturn Hirayama with expressive eyes, in which you can even see moments of brief joy scurrying in when the rest of the face disappears under the surface of the water while submerging in the public Onzen pool. Yakusho can shed tears just as quickly when emotions overwhelm the toilet cleaner after his sister visits him. Hirayama has decided against wealth and in favour of the happiness of small things, as can only be found in a modern fairy tale by Wim Wenders.

"Perfect Days" is the director's first feature film in six years. And since, as he said in an interview, this film could be realized in a short time, he completed another film almost at the same time, which now also premiered in Cannes, albeit in contrast to "Perfect Days" not in competition. The documentary film "Anselm" traces the work of the painter Anselm Kiefer using 3D film technology.

At the beginning, the camera circles sculptures on which white clothes lie in stiff folds, behind them gnarled fruit trees of a tamed garden landscape. Then the painter rides a bicycle through the long halls of his production facilities, passing shelves with textiles, old hoses, boxes of straw. The camera, completely unleashed from all physical reality, flies into the artist's paintings, turns them into dioramas, brings them to life. Otherwise, the technical gimmick is restrained, only a scene at the end shows once again why you wear the 3D glasses in the cinema.

The central theme of the narrative is a treading through Kiefer's places of work, which assign his creative phases to locations that Wenders revisited or recreated. As with his earlier artist portraits "Buena Vista Social Club" (1999) about Cuban musicians or "Pina" (2011) about the dancer Pina Bausch, Wenders concentrates on the work, biographical details only fit in if they are relevant to art (such as Kiefer's master student of Joseph Beuys). More space is devoted to the themes and works on which Kiefer has worked his way. Wenders, for example, shows the struggle with Martin Heidegger's writings, lets Ingeborg Bachmann have her say and Paul Celan reads his "Death Fugue" in an original recording, to which Kiefer refers in his pictures with verbatim quotations from the lines of verse, and sometimes it becomes very pious and affirmative. However, the director is less interested in Kiefer as a private person, which is always beneficial at a time when everyone is obsessed with private details and insights.