in purgatory
by
Douglas Messerli
Nobuo
Yamada (screenplay), Mikio Naruse (director) Midaregumo (Scattered Clouds)
aka Two in the Shadow / 1967, USA
1968
A couple,
Yumiko (Yôko Tsukasa) and Hiroshi Eda (Yoshio Tsuchiya), is looking forward to moving
to the United States where he has been reassigned by his company. She is 3
months pregnant with a new baby and is attempting to better learn English when
she receives the horrible news: her husband has been struck by a passing
automobile and has died.
Against all advice, the driver of the
car, Mishima (Yūzō Kayama), attends the funeral, where the dead man’s father
and his grieving widow angrily respond, forcing him to quickly leave. We later
discover that the accident has legally not been his fault—the car was the
problem—but in that car he was also chauffeuring two geishas as he had been
ordered to do by higher-ups in his company, a kind of tourist service; afraid
of media-attention, the head of the company not only chastises his employee but
transfers him from Tokyo to a country outpost.
Despite these setbacks and rebuffs, however,
Mishima determines to pay, in retribution, a small amount of money each month
to Mrs. Eda, and when he finds that, after having revoked by the Eda family
(perhaps having something to do with fact that the forthcoming baby suddenly
goes missing in the plot) she is now living in nearby a country inn run by her
sister Ayako (Mitsuko Kusabue) as a maid/possible geisha, he pays another
visit.
The meeting, once more, is tense, but at
least more peaceful, and gradually we begin to perceive that the two, despite
that tension, are beginning to fall in love, both of them being absolutely
beautiful beings, who dress in western-style dress and obviously share a modern
way of looking at the world—along with sharing so many disappointments in their
lives. Yumiko, being no longer part of her husband’s world, now refuses Mishima’s
monthly payments.
So begins the Japanese film director’s
deeply saturated color film, his very last, Scattered
Clouds (also titled in some venues as Two
in the Shadow). Immediately, this 1967 melodrama, seemed somehow familiar;
it was only a bit later that I realized just how much kinship this film has
with Douglas Sirk’s 1954 film, Magnificent
Obsession, a film wherein Rock Hudson’s character not only kills the
husband of Jane Wyman’s character, but later is responsible for her being hit
by a car and going blind. And suddenly I realized that in nearly all of the now
six films I had seen of Naruse, mostly about women with thwarted loves and
lives, were beautiful melodramatic studies very much in the manner of Sirk—even
though they lack his deep Hollywood Technicolor treatments or their sometimes
almost operatic-like flair (particularly in Sirk’s later works). Yet, I think
the comparison is fair, and it helps me to explain why I was drawn to Naruse
time and again. I now intend to see as many of films of as I possibly can.
If in this film, the two unlikely lovers
are increasingly brought together, and have quite clearly grown to care for
each other, we know, simply from Naruse’s images of heavy rains, trains rushing
off into space, and, most notably, their observation of another accident, in
many ways similar to Eda’s, that their love cannot be fulfilled. They’re not
just in the “shadows” of each other but are unfortunately outcasts to the
societies to which they once belonged. With its deep censure of the self and
its inability to speak openly of illness and death, their world ostracizes
people like them. Might the handsome Mishima driven a bit more carefully and discretely?
Did Yumiko abort her baby or simply have a stillbirth? Both of these very
beautiful people are doomed it appears by their very commitments and successes.
Mishima, even though beloved by his fellow employees, is yet again to be sent
away, at film’s end, to a more remote location, Lahore—a place in the Japanese
imagination that is the birthplace of cholera.
Without any other financial support, we suspect,
Yumiko may well have to submit to becoming a geisha in her sister’s employment.
The few hours of boating and enjoyment they experience are set against not only
“scattered” clouds but an endless downpour of rain and unfortunate events.
By film’s end, we can only hope that
these remarkable individuals might find a way to climb out of their purgatory,
meeting up finally in the urban center to live the life to which they might
otherwise have been destined. But, as in so many of his films, Naruse presents
us with little hope for the “best of all possible worlds.” And their departure
is a true tear-jerker in the manner of so many Sirk films. Independent-minded
women particularly do not fare well, nor working men who have lost the faith of
the firms which they so faithfully served (see Ginza Cosmetics and the brilliant, A Woman Who Ascends the Stairs). If Naruse’s films don’t always
have the polish of Ozu’s or the innovation of Kurosawa’s films, in my mind he
is still one of the Japanese film masters.
Los Angeles, May 31, 2018
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