Floating Clouds
| Floating Clouds | |
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Japanese film poster
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| Directed by | Mikio Naruse |
| 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 |
| Edited by | Hideshi Ohi |
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Release date
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Running time
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123 minutes |
| Country | Japan |
| Language | Japanese |
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 about.
The film is Naruse's most popular film in Japan, and was in 1995 named the third best film in Japanese film history.
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 flashbacks of their time in Indochina contrast with the sombre tones of the film's present.
Yasujirō Ozu saw Floating Clouds in 1955, and in his journals called it "a real masterpiece". In 1995, film magazine Kinema Junpo named it the third best Japanese film of all time. It also received 10 votes total in the British Film Institute's 2012 Sight & Sound critics' and directors' polls.
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."
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Wikipedia