Film screening: Scattered Clouds (Midaregumo)
For tickets & detailed information, please click here. Please note that this film was screened on August 22.
With Naruse's towering final film Scattered Clouds, the motifs harnessed throughout a prolific career—a shared bar of chocolate, a sudden downpour of rain, an unplanned stay at an inn—become sensuous stimuli for a relationship that is neither friendship nor courtship. Precariously employed Yukiko (Tsukasa Yoko) receives monthly payments from Shiro (Kayama Yuzo), who killed her husband in a car accident. Her decision to move home and Shiro's new post in the same town catalyzes a series of encounters that satisfy a mutual need to be desired and a hunger for meaning that pierces through the film's protracted wordlessness. A major influence on Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000), Scattered Clouds is a testament to the humanity Naruse located in the sheer act of wanting, even without the clarity of knowing who or what to want. – Kelley Dong
Directed by Naruse Mikio.
With Kayama Yuzo, Tsukasa Yoko, Kusabue Mitsuko.
Japan, 1967, 35mm, color, 108 min.
Japanese and English with English subtitles
Harvard Film Archive Floating Clouds... The Cinema of Naruse Mikio film series co-presented by the Japan Foundation and co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute