Floating Clouds

Four years before Alain Resnais made Hiroshima mon amour, Mikio Naruse created this similarly haunting elegy to memory and love and the impossibility of their reconciliation amid the rubble of postwar Tokyo. Yukiko (Hideko Takamine) seeks to rekindle a wartime affair with Kengo (Masayuki Mori). This epic melodrama, on its surface, is the anti-Naruse—the flashbacks to a sultry Indochina; murder, theft, graft, rape, and an abortion; the Camille-like heroine. And maybe it is the film’s emotional chiaroscuro, which matches the visuals, that has made it consistently voted one of the greatest of all Japanese films.