Two men, Tokyo, and Paris
Wim Wenders’ recent film Perfect Days (2023) needs no introduction. Koji Yakusho protrays the solitary traversing of Tokyo as a man who has deserted educated society and works as a toilet-cleaner. It is a spectacular performance. He speaks very little in the film. His bodily movements are exaggerated through the camera. Tokyo speaks through Yakusho’s precise hand movements. I am writing this to note the beauty and terror of solitary men cutting across nooks and crannies of large metroplitan cities.
Two cities in this case - Tokyo and Paris.
Paris appears as a damned city with its bougeois pretentions, and umbrella-toting walking crowds in the canvas of the Eiffel Tower, as a solitary, restless man considers the ceiling cracks of his room in Un homme qui dort (Queysanne, Perec 1974). George Perec writes a script that runs as a monologue addressed to this young man spanning over an hour. The young man does not speak at all. Paris draws him out, cages him in, and causes him unspeakable agony. He is alienated, restless, and simultaneously drawn to the neon-lit outer environment of the city and its false promises.
Un homme will obviously remind one of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades, written as a series of aphorisms dedicated to the high modern Paris, its boulevards, its feverish pace, crowds, and the possibility of aloneness within this cacophony. An unsettled peace, let’s call it. Both men in both films live in small pigeon-hole apartments, doing mundane things like making coffee, cleaning, washing, lying on their backs, and on occasion, reading. These are man-caves. I wondered how these films would look, if the protagonists were women.
As a gender-marked difference, I remember the loneliness of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. Her busy morning, her choosing of flowers from the market, her anxious attention to the household arre markers of her lonelinness. In Ray’s film Charulata, based on Tagore’s novella Noshtoneerh, Charu opens the film with binoculars pressed against her forehead. The lonely elite housewife. She prances from one window to another opening and shutting the blinds, marking the absence of stimulus for a wild intelligence.
I don’t wish to make a gender argument here that women’s lonelinesses are expressed differently. The city apears as a wilderness for these wild souls. Some caged inside kitchens and flowerpots, and others walking through the crowds past cinema theatres and boulevards and marketplaces internalising and externalising at the same time, the collective cry of pain that is the human condition.
[The images are stills from the film Un homme qui dort taken by me while watching the film. I should a post on the watching of watching.]