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Floating Clouds
Mikio Naruse’s 1955 film FLOATING CLOUDS [UKIGUMO], marks the first UK Blu-ray release of the one of the Japanese master’s films, released by the BFI. Review by Gary Couzens.
 

1946. Yukiko Koda (Hideko Takamine) is one of many Japanese repatriated from French Indochina – now Vietnam – after the end of the War. She worked there as a secretary at a forestry project, and had an affair with Kengo Tomioka (Masayuki Mori), an engineer who had promised to divorce his wife Kuniko (Chieko Nakakita) for her. Now in Tokyo, Yukiko seeks Kengo out and they recommence their affair, but he won’t leave Kuniko as she is now in poor health. With post-War economic restrictions in place, Yukiko struggles to make ends meet, but won’t free herself from Kengo...

Cinema had arrived in Japan around the same time as it did in other countries: the first showing of the Lumière Brothers’ films was in 1897 and the first local production was that year. However, it’s fair to say that much of the country’s output was little known in the West for many years. Akira Kurosawa’s Rashōmon (1951) won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and alterted many cineastes to what was happening in Japan. Following in the wake was Kenji Mizoguchi, with Venice also serving as a conduit for his work: The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna, 1952), Ugetsu monogatari (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō dayū, 1954) won prizes at the Festival in consecutive years, while Ugetsu gained an Oscar nomination for its black and white costume design.

Other leading directors took longer to establish themselves abroad, maybe because they were more “Japanese” in style and outlook than the others, although they all worked in the commercial film industry. For Yasujirō Ozu, it took until 1957, when Tokyo Story (Tōkyō monogatari) was first screened in the UK, four years after it was made, to make his own breakthrough. At the time of his death, just eight of Ozu’s fifty-four films had been shown in this country, none of them on commercial release, but the years since have made up for that. The BFI has recently released five of his films in two Blu-ray sets, which I have reviewed Three Films by Yasujirō Ozu and Two Films by Yasujirō Ozu Blu-ray review.

Floating Clouds

If Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu are the big three of this classic period of Japanese cinema – starting their careers with the exception of Kurosawa (the youngest, and a relatively late starter) in the silent era and with many of their peaks in the 1950s into the 1960s – then there is a fourth. It has taken a while for the films of Mikio Naruse (1905-1969) to become known in the West. Though no doubt shown in festivals and at venues such as the National Film Theatre (now the BFI Southbank) at the time or afterwards, his films don’t appear to have had commercial releases in the UK until much later. Floating Clouds (Ukigomo) generally regarded as one of his masterpieces, finally saw British cinemas in 2005, as part of a three-film retrospective from the BFI. It was accompanied by its immediate predecessor Late Chrysanthemums (Bangiku, 1954) and the later When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Onna ga kaidan o noboru toki, 1960), with a now out-of-print DVD box set following in 2007. Floating Clouds is now available on Blu-ray and let’s hope that the other two, and more, follow suit.

There are quite a few similarities between Naruse and Ozu, though they spent most of their careers at different studios, Toho and Shochiku respectively, though Naruse had begun his career at the latter. Not for nothing is the presentation on Naruse in the extras on this disc called Auteur as Salaryman: there’s a sense that he approached filmmaking as others might see their own jobs, as a place of work, to clock in and do their time and go home. Naruse was known for his timekeeping, to the point where his crews complained that they never received overtime payments as they did when working for other directors, so that day they did work past knocking-off hours just the once. Both men were prolific, with Naruse in the select company of film directors who made more features than they lived years, and Ozu not far short of that. (Mizoguchi was another, though Kurosawa was not.) Naruse directed ninety-two films, including one short, now lost, and segments of two anthology films, and he lived to the age of sixty-three. Like Ozu, he began in the 1930s with silents even though Japan had entered the talkie era by then. He made no fewer than twenty-three features and that one short between 1930 and 1934, of which just five features survive. He made his first sound film in 1935. Unlike Ozu, his career wasn’t largely interrupted by World War II. Like him, he began to make colour films in the later 1950s, though unlike Ozu, he did return to black and white from time to time. And while Ozu worked in Academy Ratio (1.37:1) to the end of his career (his films clearly being portrait rather than landscape), Naruse made films in widescreen: of the titles mentioned above, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is one he made in Scope. Away from the large-scale historical dramas of Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, both men largely stuck to comedies and dramas set in contemporary times or the very recent past, and were usually associated with particular genres: Ozu with family stories often dramatising conflicts between generations, while Naruse was a specialist in what would often be called women’s films, mostly about them and their issues and conflicts. His films are often described as shoshimin-eiga, realistic stories about ordinary people, often of the middle classes.

However, Naruse is stylistically quite different from Ozu, who by this time had refined his own distinctive cinematic vocabulary. While Ozu almost never moves his camera, Naruse does, with Floating Clouds containing several walk-and-talk scenes, with the camera keeping up with the walkers and talkers, whether it be slightly ahead, behind, or to the side. Many Japanese directors were avid watchers of American films and clearly that had an influence, so there are current popular culture references: Late Chrysanthemums ends with a joke about Marilyn Monroe’s distinctive walk, for example. In other respects, Naruse’s cinematic style is strikingly modern. See for example, the way he introduces flashbacks, often using straight cuts rather than fades or dissolves, a prototype of the jagged time-jumps of the French New Wave at least half a decade later. Alain Resnais, who was often associated with this type of narrative, was an admirer of Naruse and his leading man in Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Eiji Okada, had worked with Naruse on the earlier White Beast (Shiroi yajū, 1950) and Mother (Okaasan, 1952). Naruse’s use of this technique is sometimes startling, giving the eye a jolt as he cuts between Yukiko in the recent brightly lit past in Indochina – white dress with a black belt – to the rainy present, in a coat and scarf and trousers, all shades of grey.

Floating Clouds

If Floating Clouds is a “woman’s film” directed by a man, there are women in key positions on both sides of the screen. It is based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi. The novel was her last: she died in 1951, aged forty-seven, while it was being serialised. However, Naruse clearly felt an affinity for her work, as he adapted it for six of his films, and the screenwriter here, as it was for six others of his, was a woman, Yōko Mizuki. And in front of the camera, front and centre for much of the two-hour running time, is Hideko Takamine, who worked with Naruse on no fewer than seventeen films.

Floating Clouds is a sad story, and though there are times of happiness and humour, it’s a downhill narrative. Much of it is told in Takamine’s eloquent face, with Naruse framing her like a portrait. Masayuki Mori is a strong presence, managing to gain some sympathy for Kengo despite his actions. Some of the trauma is kept offscreen, but its effects are evident. Often it’s the small details which tell. Rain features quite heavily – becoming quite torrential towards the end – and we find out all we need to know about Yukiko’s status in one scene as she moves a bowl to catch water coming through a hole in the roof, the loud plink of the raindrops on the metal being almost the only sound we hear. The title of film and novel is explained in the latter: “The separate and isolated condition of human beings, who are like so many floating clouds.”

sound and vision

Floating Clouds is released by the BFI on a Blu-ray encoded for Region B only. Verbal references to rape, abortion and suicide might have gained the film an X certificate if it had been released in UK cinemas around the time it was made (though subtitles might well have sanitised some of it), are now the reason for a 12 certificate.

The film was shot in black and white 35mm. The Blu-ray transfer is in the intended Academy Ratio and is based on Toho’s 4K restoration. As with many monochrome films, for much of the running time it’s not so much black and white as varying levels of greyscale, particularly in the scenes in post-War Tokyo, which is most of the film. The brief flashbacks to Indochina are brighter and with intentionally more contrast (the black and white of Yukiko’s dress, for example). Grain is natural and filmlike and detail is excellent.

The sound is the original mono, rendered as LPCM 2.0. Not much to say here: dialogue is clear and while the dynamic range is inevitably not on a par with modern tracks, the music score sounds fine. English subtitles are available by default, though are optional if your Japanese is up to it. The three extras which aren’t audio-only (all carried forward from the 2007 DVD release) have optional English subtitles.

special features

Commentary by Adrian Martin
This newly-recorded commentary follows the template of Martin’s previous ones on other BFI Japanese releases (three Ozu films, for example). While he does cover Naruse’s career and the present film’s place in it, he spends a lot more time on Naruse’s mise-en-scène and how it differs from that of other Japanese directors, Ozu in particular. The use of weather gets a mention: if Naruse specialises in rainfall, Ozu’s Japan usually has weather more typical of California. Martin also draws on other critics’ writings on Naruse, even if it’s someone he strongly disagrees with – such as Noel Burch, who was largely dismissive of the director in his 1979 book To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. Martin regards the first eighteen to twenty minutes – the length of one reel in a 35mm print – of Floating Clouds as one of the greatest in cinema, compressing what took Fumiko Hayashi eighty-five pages in her novel. He also points out details that the film adds, such as the Communist march taking place outside Sendagaya Station as Kengo and Yukiko meet there; the meeting is in the novel, but the march isn’t, and this is a detail which might well be lost on non-Japanese viewers. As with Martin’s other commentaries, there’s a lot to chew on here, and it may be a bit much to take in for more general, non-cineaste listeners, but it’s more than worthwhile.

Floating Clouds

Mikio Naruse: Auteur as Salaryman (72:59)
This is an audio recording of a presentation by Catherine Russell at the BFI Southbank in 2016. Russell begins by addressing the fact that Naruse’s profile is much lower than the other three major Japanese directors of his time, and aficionados are a “special kind of club”. Possibly this is because Naruse is as a filmmaker, and by all accounts as a person, somewhat modest, a specialist in “women’s pictures” who wasn’t always a feminist. Even a regular collaborator such as Hideko Takamine never went drinking with him. Russell talks about the difference in styles between Naruse and Ozu and how Naruse’s style evolved. His silents include a lot of fast tracking, but his pace slowed somewhat with sound, and still further with widescreen, with the wider screen allowing for greater pictorial possibilities. He continued to work despite restrictions caused by the Sino-Japanese War, World War II and the seven years of the US occupation of his country, and Russell comments on how he strove to bring women’s stories into the mainstream of Japanese cinema. She talks for fifty-four minutes – with six film extracts edited out, though you do still hear her comments on them – with the rest of the time devoted to questions from the audience. These are very clear, which is not always the case on archival recordings such as this, no doubt due to a roving microphone. This item plays as an optional track on the main feature, with the film audio taking over after it finishes.

Freda Freiberg on Floating Clouds (10:18)
From 2007, this contribution from Australian critic Freda Freiberg, an authority on Japanese cinema who died in 2024, is not the solo piece as you might expect from the billing but is a conversation with Adrian Martin. They ask if the film is atypical of Ozu, as unlike other “women’s pictures” (and other women’s pictures of Naruse’s) it’s less acceptable to feminists. While women in the other films battle against hardships, Yukiko in this film is seen as self-pitying, indulging in melodramatic feelings if not outright masochism. Freiberg talks about the film’s popularity in Japan, which at the time might have had something to do with many of the audience having read the bestselling novel. However, the film softens the ending of the novel, which shows Kengo going back to his old womanising ways. Freiberg also talks about the film as an example of the ways that male and female roles in stories of this type have changed in post-War Japan, with the men affected and somewhat emasculated by the country’s defeat and the women having to become stronger to survive and in many cases become the family breadwinner. Needless to say, this and other extras on this disc should be watched or listened to after the feature.

Paul Willemen on Floating Clouds (7:07)
Also from 2007, Paul Willemen (who died in 2012), picks up the sense that Yukiko is masochistic and argues that she is not, though her establishment of her own identity in a society stacked against her is more than difficult. He sees the film as a love story but one where, citing critic Miguel Marias, the lovers are out of sync with each other.

Selected-scene commentary by Freda Freiberg (10:27)
Freda Freiberg again, also from 2007, as she discusses ten minutes of extracts from the film. She particularly points out the use of rain in the picture and the way Naruse films people walking and conversing, with Kengo seen from reverse as he walks away from Yukiko’s home and Naruse’s devastating use of her running towards the camera in an effort to catch up with him and it, and not succeeding. She also highlights the use of music, such as the recurring theme we first hear in the Indochina flashbacks, evoking that lost past.

Floating Clouds

Booklet
The BFI’s booklet, available with the first pressing of this release, runs to twenty-eight pages. It is dedicated to the memories of Freda Freiberg and Paul Willemen. The contributors to this bookleyalso feature on the disc, so inevitably there is overlap between the two. The booklet begins with a spoiler warning.

Catherine Russell begins with “Lovers Adrift in a Defeated Nation”, pointing out that Floating Clouds is one of Naruse’s most beloved films in Japan because of its dramatisation of the post-War period. She goes on to start with a typical Naruse trope, the walk-and-talk (four of them in this film between Yukiko and Kengo), but the use of location shooting is less typical, with Naruse often favouring dramas set inside the home. The film contains several Naruse regular collaborators on both sides of the camera, and it follows a familiar pattern in its story of a woman negotiating hardships both social and emotional, though it has a more tragic outcome. Russell sees the film as a love story, though it’s clear that Kengo has little affection for Yukiko. He even starts an affair with a married woman, Osei (Mariko Okada), which has tragic consequences of its own. Russell also discusses Naruse’s filmmaking methods, which were at times frustrating to his cast and crew: he barely directed the actors and ordered Yōko Mizuki to eliminate dialogue and scenes from the screenplay, even though the crew had arrived to film those scenes. She sees the film as “a tribute to those who, like Yukiko, are beautiful, not in their suffering but despite it.”

Adrian Martin is next with “The Comings and Goings of Mikio Naruse”, which as its title implies talks about Naruse’s walks-and-talks, comparing him with directors as diverse as Chantal Akerman, Béla Tarr and Quentin Tarantino. Martin sees Naruse’s characters’ physical journeys as emblematic of their emotional ones, journeys that can span countries but sometimes just a street or even a staircase. He goes on to add that our view of the great Japanese directors is often in a vacuum outside time and history, but this does Naruse in particular a disservice: he was very aware of what was going on in cinema at the time, not just in Japan, but in the work of overseas directors such as Rossellini and Bergman. If his films are set in an “eternal present”, they also struggle with the historic memory of his characters.

The late Freda Freiberg contributes “The Materialist Ethic of Mikio Naruse”, a piece from 2002 reprinted from Senses of Cinema. She begins by discussing Naruse’s status in the West compared to his contemporaries, going to state that male critics often dismissed his work, and the first major retrospective in the West was organised by a woman, Audie Bock. Freiberg sees Naruse as an arch materialist, with no escape in his films from life as it is. She traces this though various of his films, from his surviving silents to the ones he made at the end of his career, finding themes and styles present early on. She also points out his unusual affinity for women, maybe due to his collaborations with them, Fumiko Hayashi being one. Freiberg quotes Audie Bock by saying that “there are no happy endings for Naruse, but there are incredibly enlightening defeats.” The booklet also includes film credits, notes on and credits for the extras, and stills.

summary

Of the four major Japanese directors active in the 1950s, when the country’s cinema made a breakthrough in the west, Mikio Naruse has had no doubt the lowest profile, with disc releases being sparse in the UK. There is a large filmography to choose from, and let’s hope this Blu-ray release is the first of several more.

Floating Clouds Blu-ray cover
Floating Clouds
[Ukigumo]

Japan 1955
123 mins
directed by
Mikio Naruse
produced by
Sanezumi Fujimoto
written by
Yoko Mizuki
from a story by
Fumiko Hayashi
cinematography
Masao Tamai
editing
Hideshi Ohi
music
Ichirō Saitō
art director
Satoru Chuko
starring
Hideko Takamine
Masayuki Mori
Mariko Okada
Isao Yamagata
Chieko Nakakita
Daisuke Kato
Mayuri Mokusho

disc details
region B
video
1.37:1
sound
LPCM 2.0 mono
languages
Japanese
subtitles
English
special features
Commentary by Adrian Martin
Mikio Naruse: Auteur as Salaryman
Freda Freiberg on Floating Clouds
Paul Willemen on Floating Clouds
Selected-scene commentary by Freda Freiberg
Booklet

distributor
BFI
release date
1 July 2024
review posted
1 July 2024

See all of Gary Couzens' reviews