Floating Clouds (1955)

 Mikio Naruse's "Floating Clouds"

Mikio Naruse's most celebrated Japanese film, 1955's "Floating Clouds" details the troubled relationship between two expatriates trying to live life after the Second World War. What is most significant about the film is the film's general tone, which seems to convey an emptiness of Japanese society that was left in the wake of the war. This tone, along with the vacillation of the characters' behaviors between lifeless and restless create a somber portrait of post-war Japan.

Yukiko, an woman expatriated from French Indonesia, seeks out Kengo, an engineer of which she had an affair. Kengo is married to a sickly wife and shares an affair with both Yukiko and another woman. Yukiko convinces Kengo to run away with her after confessing that she is pregnant. After terminating the baby, however, she dies of bad health.

The plot of the film acts as a brace to the larger themes and tone of the film. Every moments of the film feels dim and hopeless, despite the mundanity of circumstances. The way characters behave can often be lifeless, enacting the motions of someone who is alive, but dead inside. Moments shift between desire and pain, all the while maintaining an unspoken tone of dread and decay. As Adrian Martin, editor of "Rouge" posits, " 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 existence." Naruse manages to infuse a tone that communicates the emptiness of the characters' lives and their attempts at pushing through the endless progression of time and eventual finality.

The tone that Naruse achieves also manages to communicate a certain sentiment that was deeply felt by the Japanese post-war period. As film scholar Freda Freiberg notes, "The frustrations and moroseness of the lovers in "Floating Clouds" are directly linked to and embedded in the depressed and demoralized 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." The hazy fog of depression seeps into every fiber of the film and it directly communicates the malaise and emptiness felt by an entire community.

"Floating Clouds" manages to execute a distinct vision of post-war Japan. Other filmmakers like Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa consider it one of the great pieces in Japanese cinema with Ozu even calling it a "masterpiece."