Recently I read film critic, Richard Brody's text on The New Yorker Magazine on <Perfect Days > directed by Wim Wenders. Brody criticizes harshly lack of real voices of protagonist of the film ,Hirayama. Though I haven't seen the film, his analysis is very interesting.
According to Brody, Wenders doesn't give us the details of what Hirayama thinks or remembers and put them into audiences hands. What Brody criticizes is this attidude of Wenders as director. Brody says lack of detail is abandoning the direction. So we could or even we should use more voiceover when we want to give details to audiences. I think recently the way Wenders does became popular in Japan,too . Creators like to give us atmosphere but no detailed information. It is called < お洒落 =elegance>. They use moving images ,using many video cameras simultaneously , from various angles. But Brody asserts we should use words and langue. He says even Yasujiro Ozu ( the director whom Wenders admires ) gave us details by depicting protagonists real emotions at <Tokyo story> even though dialogues didn't show detailed information. Brody's opinion on voice over is exactly what I think so I quote his sentences.
<I’ve often felt that one of the prime directorial prejudices of recent times is the fear of language—in particular, the aversion to the voice-over, in which characters’ interior monologues convey their states of mind along with their actions. In “Perfect Days,” the absence of one leaves Hirayama a cipher. What’s more, because the drama is slender and allusive, it hands the work of imagination to the viewer, as if the movie were a set of talking points, or a puzzle requiring the viewer to fill in the blanks that Wenders doesn’t care—or dare—to fill in.
Many movies could use a voice-over. With “Perfect Days,” one can even imagine how different voice-overs, meshing with the same scenes and micro-dramas, would have yielded drastically different results>
