Scattered Clouds

Mikio Naruse was already aware that he was dying when he made this deeply moving drama about a young woman haunted by her husband’s death in a car accident. She at first refuses to forgive the driver of the car, who approaches her in sincere contrition. After the two meet again by chance in Hokkaido, a fated bond slowly grows between them, although the past continues to cast its long shadow. Phillip Lopate called this “one of [Naruse’s] strangest and strongest. It is eerie to see how well his style worked inside the mode of the late sixties, and how curiously modernist it looks in CinemaScope.”