Scattered Clouds (1967) Mikio Naruse

“From the youngest age I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me.”


I became enamored of the particular life view of Mikio Naruse before I could see any of his movies.  I had picked up Philip Lopate's Totally, Tenderly, Tragically and was engulfed not by Naruse's movies, but Lopate's prose of them.  At that time the only movie of his available was  A Woman Ascends the Stairs which at that time was on a cruddy VHS tape.  I did not take the opportunity to see it, scared away by the muddy image on the tape box that  promised a lot of squinting and bad subtitles ahead.  


Now of course things are a little different.  


Streaming sites and a multi-region DVD player have brought a good number, if not alas, the majority of Naruse's films to us.  This has helped go to Lopate's point that one Naruse film will not do, that the style is so invisible in one that it appears to be no style at all. It is only after watching several and letting the themes and images wash over you that a viewer gets the idea of who this man was and why he was such a singular artist.


Dave Kehr in his invaluable NYTimes DVD column talked about the Eclipse release of early Naruse films that is coming out today and I thought it would be a nice correlative to talk about and post his last film Scattered Clouds from 1967.  

Auteurist alert!  It does share a trait with no less than three of the films in the Eclipse set (Street without End, Apart From You and Every-Night Dreams), in that it revolves around a car accident.  


The pregnant Yoko Tsukasa's husband is runover by Yuzo Kayama and after he is found innocent he tries to make amends to her.


This sounds like a case of Sirkian melodrama, and what fascinates about this film is the way the outside world starts pushing in and compressing their relationship.  And as with most Naruse, what he offers her before love is money.  The idea that everything in the world ha s price, whether it be emotions or death, haunt Naruse's cinema, which is nothing if not truly materialistic.  


And look at those colors!

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