Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Floating Clouds
1955 · Mikio Naruse · Floating Clouds on Sightlines
What stays with you after Floating Clouds is a man and a woman in a small rented room. She is sitting and he is standing, or he has turned slightly away. It is raining outside, and the room is too cramped for two people who no longer want the same thing. Nothing much is said. Mikio Naruse sets up this arrangement so often across the film that it starts to feel like a rule of the world: when Yukiko and Tomioka share a space, they never quite face each other.
The film is built out of that misalignment, and it is worth starting there because Naruse's style is easy to miss. Akira Kurosawa described it as a calm river whose surface hides a fast, deep current. The cuts come so evenly and so quietly that you stop noticing them. No shot tells you that this is the important moment. So you have to watch the way you would watch someone you love who has stopped telling you the truth, by reading posture.
This is where Gilles Deleuze can help. In his two books on cinema he describes a long period in which films ran on what he calls the action-image. A character sees a situation and acts to change it, the act produces a new situation, and so on. Most stories still work this way. Floating Clouds keeps offering this chain and then refusing to complete it. Tomioka promises in Indochina that he will leave his wife. He doesn't. After the war Yukiko finds him, the affair starts again, and every reunion looks like the turning point the story has been waiting for. Each one turns out to be another repetition. Deleuze's name for this condition is the crisis of the action-image: characters who can no longer respond adequately to what they see. Tomioka is its perfect, miserable example. He isn't a villain. He is a weak, ordinary man who can't make one decisive move, and Masayuki Mori plays him without caricature, which is exactly why the film hurts.
Yukiko is the other half of that crisis, and she is more interesting. If Tomioka can't act, she can't stop watching. Deleuze calls a figure like her the seer: someone who registers and endures a situation instead of mastering it. Hideko Takamine never asks for sympathy. Devotion, humiliation, resentment and stubborn hope all pass across her through small adjustments of how she holds herself. That is the gest, Deleuze's term (taken from Brecht) for a posture that exposes a social relation. One seated and one standing is not just blocking. It is the balance of power in the affair laid out in space, and it is also the economics of the affair, since the watch, the unpaid debts and the share in a business all pass through Tomioka's hands as signs of how he gets away.
Then there is Indochina. Naruse keeps cutting back to Dalat, and the photography marks the difference: bright, high-key light in the past, gray and rain-dark tones in postwar Japan. Deleuze calls these recollection-images, flashbacks that bring back a dated former present. The term is useful precisely because the past here is not mysterious or blurred. It is a definite place and time where love seemed possible because an empire seemed permanent. Each return to it works as refuge and reproach at once. The memory doesn't help anyone act. It only makes the present look worse. Deleuze argued that cinema gets closer to time itself when recollection takes the place of action, and Naruse catches that hinge in a love story. These people remember because they have nothing left to do.
The overall shape of the film suits another of Deleuze's images, the line of slope: an irreversible slide toward ruin. Deleuze developed it for naturalist films about primal drives, and Naruse's world has none of that savagery. His slope comes from erosion: poverty, an American serviceman who keeps Yukiko, a pregnancy, a religious huckster, illness. Still the shape is the same, a downhill road with no turning back, and on rain-soaked Yakushima the film gets as wet and enclosing as anything Naruse shot. The clouds of the title stop being a metaphor and settle on the characters.
Why is this lens worth having? Because without it Floating Clouds can look like a well-made melodrama that forgot to supply its climax. With it you can see that the missing climax is the subject. Hollywood melodrama of the same years would have brought in swelling strings and a redemptive turn. Ichirō Saitō's score holds back, and the soundtrack is mostly rain, trains and rooms. What the film refuses to give, catharsis or a decision or a reckoning, is exactly what defeated Japan didn't have either. The love affair and the empire fall together and in the same way, through promises that were never going to be kept.
Naruse didn't invent this register alone, and the film reads best as a chapter in a longer conversation. From Shochiku shomin-geki like The Neighbor's Wife and Mine he took the baseline: modest rooms and small money worries, dramatized without escalation. His own Wife! Be Like a Rose had already fixed his subject twenty years earlier, a woman's quiet disappointment staged at eye level with undemonstrative cutting. Mizoguchi's Osaka Elegy supplied the unsentimental portrait of a woman worn down by men and money, and The Life of Oharu supplied the shape of a fall through successive betrayals. Floating Clouds compresses that shape into a single relationship. Ozu's The Only Son showed how disappointment could live in posture instead of dialogue. Repast, Naruse's first Fumiko Hayashi adaptation, worked out the method of invisible cutting and sparse music that this film brings to its peak, made from one of Hayashi's last novels after her death.
What Naruse added was a way to make inaction readable without dressing it up. He trusted the even rhythm of studio craft, the medium shot and the hidden cut, to carry a whole national exhaustion. That is his invention: a melodrama whose drama sits entirely under the surface.
So watch it again, and this time watch where the two of them stand. Notice who is sitting and who has turned away, and when the light changes. The question the film leaves open is the one Yukiko never stops asking: what do you do with a love that can no longer become an act? Naruse doesn't answer it. He just doesn't let you look away.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Tomioka promises to leave his wife and never does; each postwar reunion promises change and delivers only repetition; the film denies the redemptive turn its structure keeps offering
- the seer (voyant) — Yukiko endures rather than masters her situation; Takamine registers devotion, humiliation, resentment and hope through minute adjustments of posture and expression
- the gest — Blocking that keeps the lovers misaligned (one seated, one standing, one turned away) as a spatial grammar of non-reciprocity; money and objects circulate as markers of Tomioka's evasions
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — Flashbacks to Indochina threaded through the decline, shot in high-key luminance against the gray of postwar Japan; memory functions as both refuge and reproach
- line of slope (degradation) — The narrative as an almost uniformly downward decline after the return to Japan (poverty, betrayal, illness) that reaches as far as rain-soaked Yakushima