Floating Clouds

Floating Clouds
Japanese film poster
Directed by	Mikio Naruse Kihachi Okamoto (assistant director)
Produced by	Sanezumi Fujimoto
Screenplay by	Yōko Mizuki
Based on	Floating Clouds (novel)  by Fumiko Hayashi
Starring	Hideko Takamine Masayuki Mori Mariko Okada
Music by	Ichirō Saitō
Cinematography	Masao Tamai
Editing by	Hideshi Ohi
Studio	Toho
Release dates	15 January 1955 (1955-01-15) (Japan)
Running time	123 minutes
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese

Japanese film poster showing (from the left) Mariko Okada, Masayuki Mori and Hideko Takamine.

Floating Clouds (浮雲, Ukigumo) is a 1955 black-and-white Japanese film drama directed by Mikio Naruse. It is based on a novel with the same name by Japanese author and poet Fumiko Hayashi, written just before she died in 1951. The novel is set after World War II and contains the common post-war theme of wandering; the female main character struggles to find where she belongs in post-war Japan, and ends up floating endlessly until her death at the novel's end.

The film is Naruse's most popular film in Japan,^[1] and was in 1995 named the third best film in Japanese film history.

Story

The film follows Yukiko Koda, a woman who has just returned to Japan from French Indochina, where she has been working as a secretary. Yukiko seeks out Kengo, with whom she had an affair in Da Lat during the war. They renew their affair, but Kengo tells Yukiko he is unable to leave his wife. Brightly lit flashback of their time in Indochina contrasts with the sombre tones of the film's present.

Main cast

Awards

• 1956 - Blue Ribbon Awards for best film (Mikio Naruse)
• 1956 - Kinema Junpo Award for best actor (Masayuki Mori), for best actress (Hideko Takamine), for best director (Mikio Naruse) and for best film (Mikio Naruse)
• 1956 - Mainichi Film Concours for best actress (Hideko Takamine), for best director (Mikio Naruse), for best film (Mikio Naruse) and for best sound recording (Hisashi Shimonaga)
• 1995 - Named the third best film in Japanese film history, in Kinema Junpo's 1995 "All Time Best 100" list.

Impact

Adrian Martin, editor of on-line film journal Rouge has remarked upon Naruse's cinema of walking. Bertrand Tavernier, speaking of Naruse's Sound of the Mountain described how the director minutely describes each journey and that " such comings and goings represent uncertain yet reassuring transitions: they are a way of taking stock, of defining a feeling". So in Floating Clouds the walks down streets " are journeys of the everyday, where time is measured out of footfalls, - and where even the most melodramatic blow or the most ecstatic moment of pleasure cannot truly take the characters out of the unromantic, unsentimental forward progression of their existences."

The Australian scholar Freda Freiberg has remarked on the terrain of the film : " The frustrations and moroseness of the lovers in Floating Clouds are directly linked to and embedded in the depressed and demoralised social and economic conditions of early post-war Japan; the bombed-out cities, the shortage of food and housing, the ignominy of national defeat and foreign occupation, the economic temptation of prostitution with American military personnel." ^[2]

References

External links

• Floating Clouds at the Internet Movie Database
• Floating Clouds at Rotten Tomatoes