Floating Clouds / Ukigumo (1955)

In happier times in the jungle

For many critics, Floating Clouds is one of Naruse’s masterpieces. For me, that seems a bit of an overstatement. Nevertheless, it offers Hideko Takamine and Masayuki Mori roles that rank among their best work, and in addition, provides one of the most detailed examinations of the difficulties facing the single woman in Occupation Japan.

We first see Tamakine in 1946, one of a boatload of people being repatriated from overseas. She goes to the one address she thinks she will be welcome, the home of Mori with whom she had an affair when they both worked at a forestry research station in occupied Vietnam. Surprise, surprise, despite what he had told her in Vietnam, he has a wife and several kids at home.

Her other option is her ex brother-in-law, who had raped her before the war (leading her to volunteer for overseas work to get away from him). She and Mori go to a spa to commit suicide together, but he gets distracted by another woman (who is later murdered by her husband for the affair). Takamine ends up on the streets, where she takes up with an American GI who is surprisingly the nicest man in the movie by far. But she can’t shake her love for Mori, and when he at last manages to get a job,  she follows him to one of Japan’s most tropical islands, fully aware that the disease she has developed will be worse there, ultimately leading to an extended death scene.

I suppose the complexity of Mori’s character can be said to lift this out of the typical josei-eiga. Mori was often cast as an apparently attractive lover with an appearance of sensitivity that could easily turn into weakness and insincerity. Although his actions here are those of one of the great cads of film history, he manages to convince us that somehow he is not really in control of his own character. He’s just a weak-willed nobody.

 

I, for one, still can’t understand what Takamine sees in him, but he is a far cry from Madame Yuki‘s husband, for example. She, on the other hand, at least has love, which she holds to even as she knows he isn’t really worth it.

And of course there is always Takamine herself to help hold our interest. This is not to say there is anything particularly heavy-handed about the movie-making itself. There are times when the cutting between past and present are particularly imaginative and effective. And Naruse’s signature quiet surface is always there.  Even so, the quietness of the movie-making is always at war with the sappiness of the story line, and the all but endless death scene, to my eyes at least, undercuts any integrity in the rest of the movie. Perhaps I resist it simply because it is so western, by which I mean it is a woman’s love story, pure and simple, and I have seen so many of these over the years that, despite its firm anchor in the details of Japanese life in the forties, I can’t separate it in my mind from all the other Hollywood movies about women who sacrifice themselves for a man who has treated them badly.

I am relatively alone in this opinion; it swept all the categories in the Kinema Junpo awards of the year and is still seen by many as one of Naruse’s and Japan’s great movies.  Sometimes even great art simply doesn’t connect with a particular viewer, and that may be the case here. If you’re interested in Takamine, Naruse, or the Occupation era, this is certainly worth your time; I’m just not convinced it is art.