The Cinematheque

“A great work … It is at the highest level in the history of Japanese movies.”

Ozu Yasujiro

A tale of amour fou set in the ruins of postwar Tokyo, Floating Clouds is ranked by many as master Naruse Mikio’s pinnacle achievement, and was his greatest popular success in Japan. The film features a magnificent lead performance from actor Takamine Hideko, the director’s key collaborator (all told, she would appear in 17 Naruse pictures). Takamine plays Yukiko, a typist who served with the Japanese forces in French Indochina. Returning home, she seeks out Tomioka, the engineer she had an affair with at the front. The latter (played by Mori Masayuki, also excellent) is not only married but vacillating in his affections—a characteristically weak Naruse male. Yukiko sacrifices her happiness to their turbulent relationship. Adapted from a novel by Hayashi Fumiko, whose works Naruse often turned to in the 1950s, Floating Clouds was much admired by Ozu, and won the Kinema Junpo award as the year’s best Japanese film.

In Japanese with English subtitles

The opening-night screening on January 15 will include a video introduction by Catherine Russell, author of The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Women and Japanese Modernity (Duke University Press).

“Quietly eloquent, immaculately crafted … It represents the long-neglected master at the peak of his craft and art … A film masterpiece on obsessive love to set beside Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman and Truffaut’s The Story of Adele H.”

Michael Wilmington, Los Angeles Times

“Naruse’s gut-wrenching masterpiece … A meditation on memory and loss of staggering emotional power.”

Matthew Thrift, BFI