Koji Yakusho, zen actor at Wim Wenders, interpretation award at Cannes

It cannot be said that Wim Wenders spoiled him a priori with this role of a public toilet employee in Tokyo. In Perfect Days, Koji Yakusho spends most of his time getting ready to go to work, driving his little van full of household accessories and meticulously bricking the toilets that dot the city. By receiving this Saturday evening, at the age of 67, the interpretation prize of the 76th edition of the Cannes festival, Koji Yakusho may have thought that the German director had finally offered him the role of his life.

In his overalls, Koji Yakusho-Hirayama does the maximum. His face is crossed by furtive smiles. The sweetness never leaves him. The sun playing through the sliding door of a high-tech toilet in Tokyo moves him. This quiet abnegation even when his sister twists her nose at her work, this unfailing placidity even when rushed toilet users spoil his work, makes him eminently sympathetic. He is the most zen character in the competition.

But Hirayama is also a loner who assumes himself. A follower of the routine life that he fills with miniscule pleasures, a sort of Philippe Delerm who would have taken up haikus: photographing the light in the foliage, unearthing a forgotten author at a bookstore, slipping into the hot basin of the baths public places, watering his plantations of young trees or listening to cassettes in his car radio. Koji Yakusho has a long film career. Mainly Japanese. From Imamura (L’Eel, Palme d’or 1997) to Kore-eda (The Third Murder) whom he moreover met at Cannes since the latter presented his last film in competition (Monster). In Babel by Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, he played a Japanese businessman adept at hunting.

Palme d'or for Paris Texas in 1984, Wenders, whom some nicknamed "the ghost of the Croisette", therefore returned successfully to Cannes after a wide detour through documentaries. By imagining this character out of step with his time, who still uses a silver Olympus and a radio cassette player, Wenders borrows like his Italian counterpart Nanni Moretti (Towards a radiant future, also in competition) the path of melancholy. He found in Koji Yakusho, an ideal actor, touching the festival-goers and especially the jury in a competition where the male roles were generally neither very strong nor very striking.