UKIGUMO (Floating Clouds) (124’)
by Mikio Naruse
starring Hideko Takamine, Masayuki Mori, Mariko Okada,
Isao Yamagata, Chieko Nakakita, Daisuke Kato
Japan, 1955
Restored in 4K in 2025 by Toho
Introduced by Roberta Novielli
A compelling romantic melodrama, Ukigumo was acclaimed both by Naruse’s colleagues in the film industry (Yasujirō Ozu hailed it as a masterpiece) and by Japanese critics, who ranked it first in that year’s poll of the ten best films, organised by the critics from Japan’s leading film magazine, “Kinema Junpo”. In Japan, it is still generally regarded as, in the words of Naruse scholar Masumi Tanaka, “the pinnacle of his creative achievement”. The film was one of six that Naruse adapted from the writings of the distinguished female author Fumiko Hayashi (1903-1951), and one of the seventeen in which he directed the great actress Hideko Takamine (1924-2010), whose sensitive yet determined screen persona ideally embodied his unhappy yet resourceful heroines. Ukigumo is a perfect synthesis of Hayashi’s literary sensitivity and Naruse’s visual restraint, with Takamine serving as the essential bridge between these two artistic visions. Naruse’s genius lies in his ability to capture the fleeting emotions that flick across Takamine’s face – those momentary hesitations, the quickly extinguished flashes of hope, and the quiet determination that marks her character’s journey through postwar disillusionment. The core of the film’s drama has long been interpreted as a microcosm of Japan’s wartime and postwar experience. Naruse and Takamine transform what could be a simple story of unrequited love into a profound meditation on the displacement experienced by an entire generation who had lost not only a war but their place in a rapidly changing social order. In Takamine’s nuanced performance, we witness the disillusionment of postwar Japan not as an abstract concept but as a lived emotional reality. (Johan Nordström)
