janitor

Starts like the first chapter of a Murakami novel. Mundane daily life set out in patient detail. I was waiting for a talking cat to turn up. Wenders luxuriates in the routine instead. The cassettes, the sandwich on the same bench, the photographs nobody else will see, the tree seedlings.

The second half fills the character of Hirayama in without explaining him. His niece’s arrival nudges the routine sideways; his sister’s subsequent appearance hints at a complicated backstory. When she asks whether he really cleans toilets for a living, the nod he gives back is confident, proud, and tells you more than the tears that follow. The music is great; every cassette feels like a deliberate choice rather than a needle-drop for the sake of it.

Kaufman’s least immediately legible film, and potentially his most rewarding for it. I didn’t clock how the Jake scenes and the janitor scenes connected until the credits rolled, which may be the point or may just be me being slow—either way, I want to come back to it, just not yet. I suspect a lot more clicks if you’ve got the full reference shelf to hand (David Foster Wallace, Pauline Kael, Wordsworth, A Beautiful Mind, the musicals, etc), rather than catching half like I did. Buckley and Plemons are fantastic, and Collette and Thewlis match them on a fraction of the screen time.