Summer Clouds

Mikio Naruse usually dealt with “downtown” subjects, but for his first color and widescreen film, he turned to a rural setting with a lyrical, open-air feeling and a surprising use of natural images. The story, however, is Naruse all over: it is about a war widow, Yae (Chikage Awashima), who attempts to alleviate the stifling boredom of farm life by writing stories about her agricultural village for a Tokyo newspaper, in the process falling in love with a married journalist. Whether in the city or country, the Naruse heroine is caught between a rock (the extended family) and a hard place (marriage—in this case, someone else’s).