Scattered Clouds

Director: Mikio Naruse

1967 / 108min / 35mm

Naruse’s final film is also justly one of his most beautiful. Shot in austere color Tohoscope and endowed with a gorgeously romantic score by Toru Takemitsu, this sublime melodrama stars the elegant Yoko Tsukasa as Yumiko, a genteel woman who is greeted early on with the news of her husband’s death in a freak car accident. Her old life destroyed, she finds her way to the remote northern city of Aomori, where, by a mixture of coincidence and intertwined fate, she reconnects with the young man behind the wheel (Yuzo Kayama), gradually falling in love with him. Like all Naruse’s doomed lovers, Yumiko knows that hers is a passion that she can neither deny nor accept. Enacting a tragedy of suspension, Scattered Clouds closes Naruse’s career on her ellipsis of yearning.