Wim Wenders and Sandra Hüller in Cannes: Export World Champion

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Director Justine Triet (right) thanks her leading actress Sandra Hüller with a kiss for her outstanding performance in »Anatomie d'une chute«

Photo: MOHAMMED BADRA / EPA

Cleaner Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) doesn't need an alarm clock to wake up in time. His everyday life is so clearly timed that his eyes open on their own at the first sound of the morning wind. Making a bed, brushing your teeth, buying coffee, choosing music for the car ride to work, cleaning toilets in downtown Tokyo in the morning, lunch break with a sandwich, continuing to clean toilets, going to the bathing establishment after work, dinner at the local restaurant, reading a few pages of paperback in bed, lights off, dreaming, eyes open again at the first sound of the morning wind.

Without emphasizing the meditative nature of everyday life, Wim Wenders directs the first hour of »Perfect Days«, his first film shot entirely in Japan. This year it will be his second directorial work in Cannes. At the beginning of the festival, he had shown his portrait of great artist Anselm Kiefer in a special screening. Wenders was repeatedly represented in Cannes with similarly powerful documentaries, but no longer with feature films. The fact that he was now invited to the competition after about 25 years was surprising in advance, but no longer after the viewing: "Perfect Days" is his best feature film in decades, subtle, humorous, way of life.

Together with Japanese screenwriter Takuma Takasahi, Wenders tells the story of a man who only seems to talk on weekends. Then Hirayama goes to the antiquarian bookshop to buy a new paperback for the coming week, and to celebrate the days off, he sits down at the counter of an izakaya, with whose owner he flirts very cautiously. At first glance, Hirayama's life seems to take place on the border between lonely and frugal.

Unexpected words and feelings

But Wenders elegantly elaborates on the fact that his uniform days could also be perfect days from another point of view. With every glance Hirayama casts at the sky and every nod with which he greets the homeless man who lives near one of the toilets to be cleaned, it becomes clearer how aware he is of things and the people around him and how much he appreciates them.

And then comes the drama. Or rather: come the little dramas. An unexpected visit, a nuisance at work, a thwarted Sunday ritual lure unexpected words and feelings out of hirayama. Some of the narrative developments have been created before, some come as a surprise, but none of them go beyond the modest framework that Wenders has set for himself here in the best sense of the word.

At the end, when Hirayama is once again on his way to work in the car, Franz Lustig's camera looks him in the face for minutes. Contentment, fear, joy, sadness and confidence are reflected in a wonderful interplay. The perfect days, as the film suggests in a kind of self-revision, may include not only the undisturbed days, but also those that bring anger and tears.

Leading actor Koji Yakusho, internationally known for Alejandro Iñárritu's episodic drama »Babel«, serves this emotional range with little more than his eyes. In a competition that has largely dispensed with imposing large-scale performances by individuals in favor of complicated networks of relationships, Yakusho recommends himself as a candidate for the Best Actor award. On the female side, Sandra Hüller is pushing herself for the award. She made her first brilliant competitive appearance in Jonathan Glazer's »The Zone of Interest«. There, however, it belonged more to the artistic experimental arrangement that Glazer dares to do with his film about Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß and his family than to stand out for an individual achievement. She now offers such an individual performance in the French drama »Anatomie d'une chute« (Anatomy of a Fall) by Justine Triet.

No nude party this time

Triet, born in 1978, has made a name for herself over the years with films about idiosyncratic women, the complexity of which she revealed in astonishing, often very funny narrative volts. In her previous film »Sybil«, Sandra Hüller had already appeared in a remarkable supporting role. Now Triet and co-writer Arthur Harari have written the second major cinema role of their career after »Toni Erdmann«. As the German writer Sandra, who comes under suspicion of having killed her French husband, Hüller makes the star appearance of this year's festival – without a nude party or Whitney Houston song, only with her brilliant subtlety.

An interview is at the beginning of »Anatomie d'une chute«. A young student has traveled to Grenoble to the chalet of Sandra and her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) to question the writer about the relationship between truth and reality in her autobiographical work. But deafening music from the upper floors, apparently turned up by Samuel to sabotage the interview, throws a spanner in the works. The interviewer leaves, Sandra and Samuel's ten-year-old son takes the family dog for a walk, Sandra goes to sleep – and less than an hour later, Samuel lies dead in the snow.

Did he accidentally fall during renovations in the attic of the chalet? A police investigation is supposed to dispel doubts about accidental death, but only strengthens them with every step of the investigation. In the end, it is inevitable: Sandra has to go to court.

Actually, to trust everything

But is she really guilty? In the case of a classic courtroom film, the staging would focus everything on clarifying this question. And Triet doesn't completely avoid the game of using unexpected evidence to show Sandra's character in a new light. The fact that Hüller is a star who can both serve the brute comedy of »Fack ju Göhte« and shine as a female Hamlet skilfully underpins the role with subtext: Hüller and her character can actually be trusted with anything.

But Triet proceeds in the same way with the dead man, who becomes more and more the focus of the process. What kind of man was Samuel? How did he, who also had literary ambitions, deal with his wife's success? How did he cope with his son's accident, in which he almost went blind?

It is not so much a possible murder as a relationship that is ultimately examined in court in »Anatomie d'une chute«. And this relationship turns out to be as complex and contradictory as all the relationships Triet has recounted in her films before – only this time concentrated in one story and in one place. »Anatomie d'une chute« therefore seems like an essence of her cinematic skills, including the perfect cast by Hüller.

A prize for the German would probably be the most expected award of the festival, but an even bigger prize for Triet and her film would be just as deserved. On Saturday evening, there will be certainty. What it means for German cinema when Sandra Hüller makes her best appearance in a French film in years and Wim Wenders has to travel to Japan to convince will have to be clarified afterwards.