Rating:
by Derek Smith 3/28/09

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As much as I love Kenji Mizoguchi, and he’s my favorite Japanese director so that would be quite a bit, there is something innately more compelling about the empowered women that dominate Mikio Naruse’s post-war filmography than the martyred victims of fate who are equally prominent in the former’s work.  Naruse’s films are often as tragic and heartbreaking, but the process of self-realization amidst the vicissitudes of the modern era that his heroines go through render richer characterizations and more psychologically complex portraits than perhaps any of his peers.  That he so often had Hideko Takamine, the greatest of all Japanese actresses, at his disposal certainly helps as she has the uncanny ability to convey not only a full array of emotions, but the enigmatic, paradoxical nature of her characters, with a simple glance, facial tick, posture or gesture.  And her economy of expression is matched by her director’s, a man whose single shots may not wow viewers as often as other great directors, but whose editing rhythms and compositional variety communicate so much without making a show of it.

Floating Clouds is about as perfect a marriage of Takamine’s uniquely modernist acting style and Naruse’s restrained directorial approach as one could hope for, finding both at the top of their craft.  In the film, Takamine plays Yukiko, a woman who upon returning from overseas seeks out her lover from her time spent in IndoChina and plays her with a fascinating combination of tenderness, fervor and vulnerability.  The interplay between an exoticized past, represented by the lush photography of the breezy interludes in IndoChina, and the crushing reality of a post-war present in Japan is used brilliantly not only to effectively build the drama of the central relationship, but to represent the loss and sacrifices of war without showing a single gun or soldier.  Naruse keeps the film tightly focused on Yukiko revealing both her strengths and flaws as she struggles to confront her new situation, even falling into disrepute as a prostitute for a time, yet never losing her resolve or self-respect.  And still, this intimate story, with its toes dipping in the past, is as incisive on a social level as it is emotionally devastating on a personal one.

Visually, this may be Naruse’s most impressive film with a distinctive editing pattern which frequently cuts to characters in motion, most often walking into or towards the frame.  It is a deceptively subtle technique, but one that captures the sense of the change being thrust upon the characters.  Time literally pushes them away from their utopic past towards the uncertainty of the present and each cut is a reminder of their instability as well as an impetus for change.  And yet Naruse doesn’t allow for the trajectory of a traditional tragedy as Yukiko’s indominatable spirit is rendered is so fully and complexly that her undying love reveals shades of impertinence and her constitution no longer cut from the cloth of the traditional self-sacrificing Japanese woman.  No, from the minute Yukiko stepped back onto Japanese soil, she became an agent of her own fate, fiercely ushering in the modern times into a country that perhaps wasn’t ready to accept it.