Floating Clouds
Released 1955, directed by Mikio Naruse
A melodrama with all of the plushness stripped out. It begins with the premise a good woman loves a rake and by her love redeems him, and then saps the moral complaisance from each element.
The rake, to begin with, is not of the charming, dashing variety. He is instead one of those irritating Dostoyevskian types, in which traditional morality is inverted – i.e. he is mostly bad, but his good points are so unusual and flagrant that they tempt us into thinking that he is, like a difficult poem, something worth figuring out. In one example, he has a careless affair with a married woman; she leaves her husband for him, and her husband tracks her down and kills her. Kengo (the rake) then dedicates considerable effort to raising money to hire a lawyer for the murderous husband. It’s morality as a personal aesthetic, a dangerous thing to be on the receiving end of – tastes change. Kengo is played by Masayuki Mori, who with his large craggy head and slumped shoulders makes for a perfectly elegant depressive; he attracts with his diffidence, and his dull harshness sets off his tendernesses and makes them lurid, like plumage.
The good woman, Yukiko (Hideko Takamine), is not in fact interested as anything as abstract as the good. The film is set directly after World War Two, and in the post-war scramble she’s interested in food, a coat, a place to stay, warmth. This is a hard film to get warm in. Skies lower, rain spatters. Shared warmth is the key to intimacy – a blanket spread over two laps, a hot bath together.
Yukiko and Kengo first meet in warm Indochine, where they are both stationed working for the forestry service during the war. They go on a walk together, and Yukiko confesses that she was frightened the night before, when a man came into her room drunk and made advances; later we learn that she was raped by her brother-in-law, and this helps explain Kengo’s attraction – with all his withholding any sexual threat is muted, and more broadly in a world of male horror he is only averagely horrific. They kiss. They begin an affair, and he promises to divorce his wife.
This is all told in flashback – the film begins with Yukiko arriving back in Japan, at loose ends, and tracking Kengo down. She finds him living in straightened circumstances, still with his wife; he steps out with her – flashbacks are intertwined with all of this, a beat in the present and a beat in Indochine. We cut from their first kiss to their first kiss post-war, signaling that neither of them will leave well-enough alone. From here on out the flow of the action is winding and inevitable. Yukiko pursues Kengo, he withdraws; but he can’t cut her off. He is miserable and hates himself – he should hate himself – and she knows it and loves him. He’s not willing to deny himself the opportunity to be both seen clearly and liked, and who is, it’s heroin for the soul. The film’s saddest moment – bar the end – comes when Kengo begins an affair with a second woman, and tries to conceal it from Yukiko. By presenting her with a less loathsome façade he’s striking more deeply at the root of their relationship than by the affair itself.
At the beginning of the film Yukiko seems bruised and woozy on her feet, living hand to mouth, and we wonder if she’ll survive. She does, hardening; her smiles become half-smiles, her suffering competent. For a while she is supported by an American GI. Then she hooks up with an old flame who is running a faith-healing scam – she approves of the con, but the effort of it is gross; she steals from him and returns to Kengo. Kengo is also drifting. He drinks and is a failure at business; his wife dies of cancer because he can’t scrape together enough money for treatment. Both Kengo and Yukiko have become detached from normal society, and it’s unclear whether it’s their relationship that caused it, or whether this near-spiritual capacity for detachment was already present in them both from the beginning, and is what binds them together. Naruse is as grounded as grounded can be, and he never presents their untethering as a lark; but he shows its pleasures in appropriate proportion: the charms of gloomy walks, off-season resorts, independence. Still, the ultimate dream of each is to become middle-class and respectable – past a certain point they’ve had too much existential adventure.
This is a film of pairs – I’d guess three-fourths of the scenes are of two people talking, usually Yukiko and Kengo, their faces often shown very close up, the better to track their subtle shifts between irony and feeling (Takamine has an open face that she controls with complete precision). It’s an interesting effect to find in a movie that is actually quite sprawling and complex; in something like Linklater’s Before Sunrise the intensity of the focus on a single couple brings to life the shared world they’re able to create – their insulation. There is very little insulation in Floating Clouds. We often hear the sound of wind, a signal to take shelter. Yukiko and Kengo do finally try to make a go at it. They journey to a small island off the coast where it constantly rains; he will work in the forestry service again, and they will pose as man and wife. There is no sense that Kengo will be a better man, only that now he is willing to let Yukiko be near him. She veers between happiness and self-mockery. The film could easily have left them here, without any great prospect for happiness. But it ends instead with a reassertion of the melodramatic format. Yukiko falls ill and dies during a rainstorm; Kengo cries over her body. He pictures her as she was when they first met, innocent and sunny. You could take it as evidence that he never really understood her, or valued in her what she valued about herself.
NOTES
Naruse at one point rejected the marriage proposal of a waitress at a café he frequented, and in response she committed suicide. The plot of Floating Clouds has no basis in this incident – it comes from a novel by Fumiko Hayashi; but read the resonances how you will.
The score this film is unusual, a kind of sullen orientalist slow march. I found myself contrasting it with Ozu, who typically uses western-sounding themes, cheerful and uninflected, floating over the action; this slinks beneath.
We never get to see the face of the GI Yukiko dates, or spends time with, or however their relationship might be defined. Showing the faces of American soldiers on film was actually banned by the censorship regime in place during the Allied occupation. Floating Clouds was post-occupation, however, thus I’m not sure what drives the decision here.
