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Floating Clouds

This article is about the film. For the art piece, see Floating Clouds (artwork).
Floating Clouds
Theatrical release poster
Directed byMikio Naruse
Screenplay byYōko Mizuki
Based onFloating Clouds
by Fumiko Hayashi
Produced bySanezumi Fujimoto
StarringHideko Takamine
Masayuki Mori
Mariko Okada
CinematographyMasao Tamai
Edited byEiji Ōi
Music byIchirō Saitō
Production
company
Distributed byToho
Release date
  • 15 January 1955 (1955-01-15) (Japan)[1][2]
Running time
123 minutes
CountryJapan
LanguageJapanese
Film poster showing (from the left) Mariko Okada, Masayuki Mori and Hideko Takamine.

Floating Clouds (Japanese: 浮雲, Hepburn: Ukigumo) is a 1955 Japanese drama film directed by Mikio Naruse.[1][2] It is based on the novel Ukigumo by Japanese writer Fumiko Hayashi, published just before her death in 1951.[a] The film received numerous national awards upon its release and remains one of director Naruse's most acclaimed works.[4][5][6]

Plot

The film follows Yukiko, a woman who has just been expatriated from French Indochina, where she has been working as a secretary for a forestry project of the Japanese wartime government. In Tokyo, Yukiko seeks out Kengo, one of the engineers of the project, with whom she had an affair and who had promised to divorce his wife Kuniko for her. They renew their affair, but Kengo tells Yukiko he is unable to leave his sickly wife. She becomes the mistress of an American soldier as a means to survive in times of economic restraint. Still, Yukiko can't cut ties with Kengo, although he even starts an affair with a married younger woman, Osei. Pregnant from Kengo, Yukiko has an abortion. She later hears from Kengo that Kuniko has died from illness. Eventually, Yukiko follows Kengo to his new job on Yakushima island, where she dies of her bad health and the humid climate.

Cast

Reception

Film director Yasujirō Ozu saw Floating Clouds upon its release and called it "a real masterpiece" in his journals.[7]

Awards

  • 1956: Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Film
  • 1956: Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film, Best Actor (Masayuki Mori), for Best Actress (Hideko Takamine), and for Best Director (Mikio Naruse)
  • 1956: Mainichi Film Concours for Best Film, for Best Actress (Hideko Takamine), for Best Director (Mikio Naruse), and for Best Sound Recording (Hisashi Shimonaga)

Legacy

Floating Clouds is Naruse's most popular film in Japan.[4] It ranked number three of the best Japanese film of all time in a poll of 140 Japanese critics and filmmakers conducted by the magazine Kinema Junpo in 1999.[5][6] Filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited the film as one of his 100 favourites.[8]

It was screened at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in 1981,[9] at the Museum of Modern Art in 1985,[10] and at the Harvard Film Archive in 2005[11] as part of their retrospectives on Mikio Naruse, and at the Cinémathèque Française in 2012 and 2018.[12]

Analysis

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."[citation needed]

Film 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."[4]

Notes

  1. ^ The serialisation of Ukigumo ended in August 1951, two months after Hayashi's death on 28 June.[3]

References

  1. ^ a b "浮雲(1955)". Kinenote (in Japanese). Retrieved 20 July 2023.
  2. ^ a b "浮雲". Japanese Movie Database (in Japanese). Retrieved 20 July 2023.
  3. ^ Hayashi, Fumiko (2006). "Preface by Lane Dunlop". Floating Clouds. Translated by Dunlop, Lane. Columbia University Press.
  4. ^ a b c Freiberg, Freda (2007). Mikio Naruse (DVD). British Film Institute.
  5. ^ a b "Kinema Junpo critics top 200". MUBI. Retrieved 12 July 2023.
  6. ^ a b "Top 200 - Kinema Junpō (2009)". Sens critique (in French). Retrieved 12 July 2023.
  7. ^ Richie, Donald (29 September 2008). "An Autumn Afternoon: Ozu's Diaries". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved 17 February 2021.
  8. ^ Thomas-Mason, Lee (12 January 2021). "From Stanley Kubrick to Martin Scorsese: Akira Kurosawa once named his top 100 favourite films of all time". Far Out Magazine. Retrieved 23 January 2023.
  9. ^ "Floating Clouds (Ukigumo)". BAMPFA. Retrieved 20 July 2023.
  10. ^ "Mikio Naruse: A Master of the Japanese Cinema Opens at MoMA September 23" (PDF). Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 20 July 2023.
  11. ^ "Floating Clouds". Harvard Film Archive. Retrieved 20 July 2023.
  12. ^ "Nuages flottants". Cinémathèque Française (in French). Retrieved 20 July 2023.
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