Floating Clouds

If you don’t know Naruse, you should. When cinema was still in its experimental stage he was already playing with stories that felt deeply familiar. Ordinary lives shaped into something that needed to be seen. Floating Clouds is quiet, painful and firmly honest about love, regret and emotional exhaustion.

It feels like watching two people cling to something that’s already rotted away, knowing it’s hopeless but unable to let go. It’s not romantic in any comforting sense. It’s messy and bitter, with performances that make the emotional damage feel inevitable rather than dramatic.

A truly devastating film about unrequited love. Yet both characters aren’t fully innocent. The morality of Yukiko and Tomioka’s affair is dubious and the way their relationship out drags on in different times of their lives that reflect the desolation and despair of living in post-World War II under US occupation. Poverty, unemployment, food shortages, prostitution being rampant, a period of deep depression. It’s difficult to watch a pitiful Yukiko hopelessly in love with a man that seems to only use her to satisfy his desires and desperations then leaves her by the wayside. The stings are most palpable in the very small things, the subtleties. Yukiko and Tomioka simply strolling side by side, yet she imagines they were a couple while he laughs it off, a paradoxically romantic and unromantic connection, the stroll of man and wife. Although it’s definitely melodramatic, the painful beauty is in the narrative and the subtleties. (Note to self: Need more sleep to watch films like this)