Edgar Cochran ✝️’s review published on Letterboxd:
When I saw this with my beautiful fiancée, I kept reflecting throughout on the people that I labelled that same day as “phantoms”.
Since I was little, I always had this custom of saying hi to everyone because that was the education that was handed to me. However, on the eyes of my primary school, I was applying this social conventionalism perhaps a little bit too much: “Edgar says hi to the guys that cleans the bathroom, hahaha”. I never understood the reason, but the primary-school logic (literally) made a mental correlation between “bathroom” and “person” and translated that as “dirty losers”. And so it was: if you said hi to poor people on the streets and gave them money, or paid attention to any maintenance personnel, you “wanted to be poor” and “you were as dirty as them”.
Coming back to the present day and escaping the 6-year-old mentality, do we really notice everyone around us? Especially those people that we do not necessarily discriminate for their jobs or social / economic position, but that we may have for granted? The public transportation system drivers, the scavengers and waste pickers, the personnel that has a towel ready for you in public bathrooms, the ones that actually clean it, and even maids and house servants who commonly have less life luxuries than us.
Yes, this review might be seeming like a Civics class for primary school or high school students, but this reflection goes beyond “respect everyone”. Do we acknowledge their existence? Do we say hi to them and thank them for keeping our classrooms and offices clean, for not stealing anything from our houses and taking care of our children? Do we even consider the remote possibility that they have fully fleshed lives, a family to look after, and that we might be their only source of income if they work full-time in hour homes from Monday to Saturday?
What I have witnessed firsthand is that saying “hi miss” and “thanks mister” can change their day. The feeling of having someone to talk to stops making them be phantoms: wondering souls that we take for granted they exist. Koji Yakusho’s acting is simply... flawless. There is not a thing to point out as humanly unrealistic: we are immersed in his routine like being invited by Jeanne Dielman to her home and then taken everywhere. This is shown in such great, intimate detail that we can pinpoint the tiny differences between one day and the next. The scoreless approach of it all works wonders for naturalistic reasons, and makes it all just more human.
To those out there that think that routine is hell in a loop where nothing happens, I tell you this: I thought the same thing. I always related routine with a lack of progress and a life devoid of excitement, let alone success. These are the archetypes that should be destroyed. How many ministries are we called on to be faithful? Family, marriage, friendships, the current job, bills, taxes, local and national laws... Whether we like them or not, we always have a choice: to keep those ministries stable for our peace’s sake, or break its balance and throw away what has been granted to us. We can change our way of life, philosophies, professions, hobbies, jobs, and even your washing machine and your television set (ye...), but we cannot act like grasshoppers, jumping from one family to the next one, especially as a father or mother.
Blessings and happiness can be found in routine; it’s not stability for losers, it’s another wise way to live if that is the ministry you were called to fulfill. Adaptation to change is crucial, but is not the all-governing rule like corporative capitalism and cheap self-help books would sell you.
84/100
