Floating Clouds
Plot. The film follows Yukiko, a woman who has just been expatriated from French Indochina, where she has been working as a secretary for a forestry project of the Japanese wartime government. Yukiko seeks out Kengo, one of the engineers of the project, with whom she had an affair and who had promised to divorce his wife for her. They renew their affair, but Kengo tells Yukiko he is unable to leave his wife. Yukiko can't cut ties with Kengo, although he even starts an affair with a married younger woman, while she becomes the mistress of  an American soldier as a means to survive in times of economic restraint. Eventually, she follows Kengo to an island where he has taken a new job, where she dies of her bad health and the humid climate. Awards and legacy. Yasujirō Ozu saw "Floating Clouds" in 1955, and called it "a real masterpiece" in his journals. The film is Naruse's most popular film in Japan. It was voted the second best Japanese film of all time in a poll of 140 Japanese critics and filmmakers conducted by the magazine "Kinema Junpo" in 1999. It also received 10 votes  total in the British Film Institute's 2012 "Sight & Sound" critics' and directors' polls. Analysis. 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." The Australian scholar Freda Freiberg has remarked on the terrain of the film: "The frustrations and moroseness of the lovers in "Floating Clouds" are directly linked to and embedded in the depressed and demoralised social and economic conditions of early post-war Japan; the bombed-out cities, the shortage of food and housing, the ignominy of national defeat and foreign occupation, the economic temptation of prostitution with American military personnel."