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Drama

Floating Clouds

Ukigumo

Year
1955
Director
Mikio Naruse
Length
124 minCriterion Channel 124-minute presentation Version sources ↓

A woman returns to postwar Japan and tries to revive a wartime affair with a man whose promises repeatedly dissolve into avoidance.

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Country
Japan
Language
Japanese
RomanticBleak Approachable · Moderate Drama
Original illustration: A rain-softened Japanese hillside town seen from a wooden veranda with an umbrella and suitcase beneath the title.

Image: Monocurator · source · Original Monocurator artwork

What to expect

Naruse makes repetition accumulate rather than reset. Streets, rooms, weather, and remembered landscapes measure the unequal labour of sustaining a relationship after the conditions that created it have vanished.

How to ease in

The relationship circles rather than progresses. Track what Yukiko asks for, what Kengo promises, and how each reunion changes the balance between memory and present behaviour.

Heads-up

A quick, non-exhaustive note Includes emotional abuse, infidelity, poverty, illness, wartime displacement, sexual exploitation, and sustained despair.
Momo's Note May contain spoilers Who is Momo? →
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Yukiko keeps testing whether memory can become a place to live. I feel each return grow heavier because the past remains vivid while the man attached to it keeps becoming less available.

— Momo

Momo thinking about this film

Credits & versions

Credits

Version map

Criterion Channel 124-minute presentation 124 min 124 minutes is attached only to the named Criterion Channel 124-minute presentation. No unsupported cut, score, territory, frame rate, source element, or restoration detail is inferred. Source: The Criterion Channel — Floating Clouds Runtime reference · Checked 2026-08-21

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