Wim Wenders was asked to make a documentary about seventeen toilets in Tokyo that were designed by star architects, so the story goes. Instead, he tells the story of a contented outsider called Hirayama who cleans those toilets, attends to his comprehensive collection of musical cassettes and sees no need at all for any kind of emotional turmoil in his life. The result has emerged as one of the box-office successes of the season. (It is not inconceivable that Hirayama's cassette collection merely served Wenders as a pretext to play all of his favourite songs in one film, but there would be nothing wrong with that either: the soundtrack is pure bliss.)