Pleasure Seekers

Greetings, all, from what I’m assured is the final stretch of the final stretch of the programming cycle before our eyeballs fall out. I have filed my notes and recorded what will be history’s most heavily edited Instagram video, and all I know now is that “frantic middle-aged banging” is seen more as an enticement than a content advisory.

(What movie am I talking about? You’ll find out in September. Probably.)

Now, though, I’m finishing this week’s roundup of new releases. I’m still waiting on Civil War and The Boy and the Heron, mind you, but we’ve got enough for a column.

Let’s start with one of the best films of last year: Wim Wenders’ masterful Perfect Days, which arrived on disc this week from the Criterion Collection. As I wrote back in December, this is the return to form I’ve been hoping Wenders would make for a very long time now – a methodical, idiosyncratic and deeply, deeply rewarding character study that reaches back to his breakthrough cinema of the ’70s and ’80s. And, yes, it’s about Japanese public toilets.

Kôji Yakusho, of Tampopo and Cure and a dozen other modern Japanese classics, stars as Hirayama, a man in his sixties who drives around Tokyo maintaining the city’s impressive public bathrooms. It’s a paying job, not that Hirayama seems to need money all that much; he lives very simply, dines at the same noodle counter every day, and enjoys older albums and books. There are hints that his tastes used to be more excessive, or at least more expansive; now, all we really know is that he doesn’t talk much, and finds his chatty co-worker Takashi (Tokio Emoto) as annoying as we do.

So, no, despite Takashi’s constant prodding, Hirayama doesn’t have a social life. But neither is he antisocial, providing advice when asked and offering musical curation to Takashi’s sometime girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada) when his cassette of Patti Smith catches her attention. He takes in his niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) when she has nowhere else to go. He may not say much, but he’s a good person. Was he always? We don’t know. Does it matter?

Wenders lets us glide alongside Hirayama as he moves through the city, watching, thinking, listening. The director’s soundtrack is, as always, unimpeachable, grounding the soft-spoken protagonist’s tastes in a specific cultural moment. And in the simple, repetitive acts of service Hirayama provides to those exquisitely designed public conveniences, both the character and the filmmaker find something like transcendence.

Watching Perfect Days last year, I thought it felt like Wenders’ answer to Jim Jarmusch’s wonderful Paterson, another film about a man who isolates himself from society so he can better perceive it. On second viewing, the call and response is even more clear: Jarmusch’s film is about a poet forever committing his interpretations of the world to paper, while Wenders’ hero doesn’t seem the least bit concerned with recording his thoughts. Hirayama is enjoying the poetry that’s already there.

Criterion’s special edition of Perfect Days – it’s available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo as well stand-alone Blu-ray and DVD editions, all of which are available at a considerable discount this month from Barnes & Noble in the US and Unobstructed View in Canada – is, like the film itself, a modest but very satisfying endeavor. The image is sublime, with 5.1 DTS-HD audio that moves smoothly between the natural soundscape of Hirayama’s world and the songs that serve as his own personal soundtrack; the 4K disc is beautifully detailed, with a delicate HDR layer offering subtle accents to light sources and the lush greens of the park where Hirayama eats his lunch every day. It’s all intentional. That’s the point.

Supplements include meditative interviews with Wenders and Yakusho, Wenders’ 2023 short film some body comes into the light and an interview with The Tokyo Toilet’s Koji Yanai, whose invitation to Wenders to visit the project served as the unlikely inception point for Perfect Days. There’s also a trailer, and a typically thoughtful essay by New York film critic Bilge Ebiri.

There are no special features whatsoever on the VVS Films Blu-ray of Hit Man, which is perhaps unsurprising: Since Netflix bought the film at TIFF last year and owns the global streaming rights, we’re lucky to see any physical edition at all. But you know the deal: Physical releases of movies bought by streamers are few and far between, so when the opportunity arises to have one on one’s shelf, one must act.

And, of course, this is a Rick Linklater joint. Attention must be paid. 

To be honest, I was really surprised by the reception Hit Man received when it came to TIFF last September; it’s a fun romp, certainly, but I didn’t think it had the legs to become a sensation. Maybe it’s just that I’m mildly allergic to his true-crime pictures; I wasn’t really that high on Bernie, either, and the way it uses “based on a true story” to spin what’s ultimately a work of total fiction didn’t sit too well with me at the time.

On a second viewing, knowing that Hit Man isn’t even going to pretend to be concerned about anchoring a story in the real world and just rolling on the playful chemistry between Glen Powell and Adria Arjona – both of whom Linklater regards as extinction-level smokeshows trying to hide behind a façade of normalcy, the way Doug Liman used Pitt and Jolie in Mr. & Mrs. Smith – makes for a pretty good time.

Powell, who co-wrote and co-produced with Linklater, stars as dweeby New Orleans philosophy professor Gary Johnson, who pretends to be a killer-for-hire in order to entrap would-be clients for the local police. Johnson’s kind of a milquetoast, but building elaborate impressions of Christian Bale ...

and Tilda Swinton ...

to convince his marks that he’s a proper baddie unlocks some long-repressed aspects of his personality.

And Arjona, who’s been an intriguing supporting player in everything from Pacific Rim: Uprising and 6 Underground to Good Omens and Andor, finally gets the breakout role she’s been chasing as Madison, a woman Gary manages to steer away from self-incrimination … so he can date her. In character, of course, since Assassin Gary is way more interesting than Academic Gary.

The result is a really charming movie, if you actively ignore everything you might have learned about the real Gary Johnson, who did all of his fake-hitman work in Houston decades ago and did not end up in the No Way Out situation that serves as Hit Man’s third act, with Madison’s abusive ex-husband ending up dead and Gary forced to figure out whether she actually whacked him … and, if she did, how far he’s willing to go to keep her out of prison.

That last act gets pretty silly, but Powell and Arjona make it fly on their sexy, desperate charisma. And Linklater finds ways to keep us on their side throughout, nudging us to enjoy these beautiful dopes as much as he clearly does. It works. It’s fun. It’s just not terribly deep.

VVS’ Blu-ray offers a sharp, lively presentation of the film, with 5.1 Dolby TrueHD; it’s always possible Criterion might have a 4K edition in the pipeline, since the label’s relationship with Linklater goes back to the LaserDisc days, but as of today there’s been no word of an American release whatsoever. I have also noticed Wal-Mart tends to sell VVS BDs for about half the SRP within a month of release, so you might see it going for $10 fairly soon. That’d be a no-brainer.

Elsewhere in the cinema of “sexy people doing sexy things and sometimes arguing”, Luca Guadagnino thrust himself into the chat with Challengers, the latest in a long line of films that arrive drenched in both style and bodily fluids.

Cool your jets, kids: The fluid of choice here is sweat, which drips and sprays from his three protagonists, Tashi (Zendaya), Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor), all former and/or current tennis players – and former and/or current lovers – drawn back into one another’s lives at a key match in the fall of 2019.

The film starts there, and jumps back fourteen years to the day all three of them met: Art and Patrick, doubles partners and roommates since their tweens, saw rising star Tashi and both tried to get her number. She was 18, they were maybe a few months older, and they all ended up in a hotel room together ... where it turned out she had their number all along.

Soon after, Tashi and Patrick became an item while he tried to make a go of a pro career and Art went off to Stanford – which is also where Tashi went to school, and where they ran into one another again while Patrick was competing around the world.

Did Art try to make an end run around Patrick and win Tashi for himself, or was Patrick always going to screw that up? However you look at it, Art was the one who was there for Tashi when she blew out her knee and ended her tennis career, and Patrick was sulking in a corner.

The movie cuts back and forth between Art and Patrick’s 2019 face-off – which, we’re meant to believe, is the first time the two have played one another on the court and also the first time they’ve seen each other in a decade or so, during which time Patrick’s career has fizzled out to nothing and Art, coached by Tashi – who is now his wife and the mother of his child – has become a world-class player complete with his own Uniqlo sponsorship. And now, they fight with rackets and a fuzzy green ball for bragging rights, and maybe also Tashi’s heart? That last thing feels like a stretch, but it’s the nail Guadagnino pounds the hardest.

I find Guadagnino’s movies a little exhausting at the best of times. I hated Suspiria, didn’t much care for Bones and All, and Call Me By Your Name was … fine, I guess, so long as you actively refuse to think about the grooming narrative that’s unfolding before your very eyes. And that's the problem: All of Guadagnino's films purport to wrestle with deep and meaningful subject matter, but they're all style and surfaces. When I try to unpack them, I have no idea what he wants to say.

Challengers doesn't pretend to be deep. Justin Kuritzkes’ script is just a string of excuses to watch pretty people doing athletic things both in and out of their clothes, with a thesis no deeper than its title: These three people challenge each other on and off the court! And it turns out that a concept this simple is exactly what Guadagnino needs. He overloads the visual side, of course, but he always does, and here the excessive, self-indulgent nature of his ideas actually works for the overadrenalized world in which the story takes place.

Why not shoot a climactic argument outdoors in a hurricane-level windstorm, placing the characters in a space that externalizes their roiling emotions? Why not shoot a round of that all-important match from the perspective of the ball, so we have no idea who’s winning or where we are in physical space? Why not direct O’Connor, one of the most weirdly magnetic people working today, to spend an early scene shooting glances at someone else’s Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast sandwich like he’s a cartoon dog and it’s a giant hoagie, to better tell us he hasn’t eaten in a while?

Other directors would not have asked this of their performers, but that is why other directors are not Luca Guadagnino.

Anyway, I’ll admit it: Challengers won me over. Like Hit Man, it’s not asking the world of its audience; it’s just a movie about sexy tennis, sexy arguing, sexy tennis again and some actual sex.  Faist, O’Connor and Zendaya all look and move like gods, though only Zendaya manages to be convincing as the teenage Tashi. The lads may be styled younger for those scenes, but they never read any younger than mid-twenties. Also, Faist looks looks eerily like John Mulaney as the young Art, and someone should write them a comedy where they play brothers who run a dive bar in Yonkers. I would watch that.

Also - and this is important – the performances are very good. Zendaya has always been great at playing self-possessed characters, but she’s fantastic here, someone who’s both smarter and more competent than everyone else around her, and has developed an impatience with the world as a result. Faist and O’Connor have characters who are less, um, challenging: Art’s losing interest in the game, while Patrick wants nothing more than to be back in it. They come at everything from opposite sides, which works both literally and metaphorically.

Sure, it would be more interesting if the homoeroticism that’s teased – also literally and metaphorically, as it happens – in their first encounter with Tashi continued to resonate into their present-day rivalry, but that’d turn a love triangle into a quadrangle or pentangle or whatever, and this script has no room for that. (The one very funny boner joke is almost certainly Guadagnino’s own addition.) Thinking gets in the way of all the sweating, you see.

As has become customary for its Amazon MGM releases, there are no special features whatsoever on Warner’s Challengers Blu-ray, not even a trailer. But that just leaves more space for the feature, and it’s pristine, with a supercharged Dolby Atmos mix that carefully sets Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ Euro-club score apart from the sports noises swirling around it. And the spatial delineation of the players’ signature sounds – a hard exhalation from Patrick, a more controlled wheeze from Art – is audio voodoo of the highest order.

Perfect Days is available from the Criterion Collection in a 4K/BD combo and a stand-alone Blu-ray, both of of which are deeply discounted for another week or so at Barnes & Noble in the US and Unobstructed Viewv in Canada. Hit Man is available on Blu-ray in Canada from VVS Films, and Challengers is available everywhere on Blu-ray from Warner Home Entertainment.

Also! Congratulations to Trevor Anderson, who won last week's giveaway of the 4K combo of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Remember, you can't win if you don't play.

Coming soon: Remember how I mentioned Dean Koontz’ Phantoms last week? Well, funny story. Also, The Fall Guy and I Saw the TV Glow offer two very different discourses on media literacy. Subscribe so you don’t miss any of it!