Once regarded as highly as Kurosawa and Ozu, Japanese director Mikio Naruse’s star has fallen in recent decades, with few of his films readily available in the West. I’d suggest reading Hayley Scanlon’s concise introduction to Naruse’s work on the BFI website as a prelude to watching this restored print of Floating Clouds. Scanlon describes him as "cinema’s greatest pessimist", something that’s hard to disagree with on the basis of this work alone.
Floating Clouds, released in 1955, is a dark love story set in the ruins of post-war Tokyo. Hideko Takamine’s Yukiko returns from working in an admin post in occupied Indochine and continues her fraught on/off courtship with the brooding, charismatic Tomioka (Masayuki Mori), a forestry engineer she meets whilst abroad. We see the couple in brightly lit flashback sequences, wartime Indochine a relaxed idyll compared to the present day's bombed-out streets. Naruse’s directorial eye is less formal, more fluid than Ozu’s, the camera following the pair as they walk to and fro, the damp, cluttered squalor of both characters’ living quarters always painfully clear.
Tomioka’s indifference is apparent from the start. He reneges on his promise to divorce his wife so that he can marry Yukiko, and we suspect all along that his chief loyalty is to himself. An unsatisfactory fling with a GI keeps Yukiko in coffee and cigarettes while Tomioka continues to be unfaithful. Despite this, and though they’re clearly unsuited, the couple struggle to stay apart. Naruse’s frankness is startling: Yukiko is haunted by memories of past sexual assaults, and a visit to an abortion clinic isn’t glossed over. She and Tomioka share a bath together. The relationship stutters on, the best, bleakest lines spoken by Yukiko, who at one point describes herself as “just a memory, and a memory quickly fades.”
A glimpse of Tomioka’s battered shoes hints at his precarious financial state, and it’s inevitable that a potentially happy ending for the pair won’t come to fruition. Yet, despite the gloom, this is a gripping film, visually striking and wonderfully acted. Naruse based the film on a bestselling novel by Fumiko Hayashi, and the closing quote, taken from a Hayashi poem, is just as devastating as Tokyo Story’s “Isn’t life disappointing?” The BFI’s restored print comes with enticing extras, including contributions from historians Frieda Freiberg and Catherine Russell. Good booklet essays too, particularly Adrian Martin’s examination at the role of walking in Naruse’s films.
