Floating Clouds

Saw Floating Clouds, a black-n-white Japanese film from the 50s about a woman who returns to Japan from French Indochina, following WW2. She cannot find a job and defaults to drifting (in an almost cloud-like manner) between different men. There are two mainstays that she keeps returning to, one Don Juan-ishly infuriating and romantic but chronically unable to keep a job, the other stable but cruel. To complicate matters, the stable man is already married and the Don Juan has a wandering eye. Other women, even delivery-girls, always arouse the protagonist's jealousy and understandably so. The protagonist is almost constantly in a state of flux. Even when her life is relatively stable, we get close-ups of her face looking pained, her eyes glancing sideways, ever suspicious of the sand her life is built on.

The film gives us a bit of cheat-sheet for the state of things with the brightness of the picture. The most idyllic days, when she is in French Indochina, are bright and sunny. When she first meets the cruel man, he insults her causing her to run into a hallway full of plants and venetian blinds, striating her body with shadows. That evening, in the dark of night, she is raped. Later on in the film she is planning a likely-sounding future with her current boyfriend and all seems well until a shadow moves across their faces as they're talking and we know trouble's brewing. There are also rays of hopeful sunlight and cheerful maids in white kimonos.

It's an interesting film but it ultimately is not very optimistic about this refugee woman's chances. She talks of herself as drifting and being rootless. Her fellow-travellers/sufferers are similarly displaced, changing jobs, moving, dying. I was not really in the mood for this sort of film and anyway I prefer the attitude that life is change (so get used to it!) To compound this, my subtitles (oh hated enemy!) were borked in some strange way: all of the 'b's were replaced by 'd's. This lead to some unintentional comedy as everyone bemoans being unable to find a 'jod' or one man telling the protagonist that he's left his 'jod' at the 'dank.' One character mournfully cries about his wife dying of 'tuderculosis' and another cheerfully announces that she has 'drought your dar dill.' Silliness.