Movie Review

[Steven Spinali]

spinali at postmark.net

A Movie Review

YUYAKEGUMO (Clouds at Twilight) 1956

Koichi, all of 16, feels he has all of his dreams before him  That
is, if he ignores the fact that he?s the son of a middling ?sh-seller,
without great prospects, and the eldest son in a family of four
children...and that he?s not particularly gifted, smart, or
good-looking.  His are the unexamined dreams of a child, but with the
foreshortened viewpoint of youth, most anything is possible.  

Koichi?s dreams are modest.  First, he?d like to become a seaman just
like his uncle (who had died on the seas -- but that?s no concern of
Koichi), a future offering him escape from the narrow confines of his
old wooden home.  And for quite some time he?s been in love with a
girl (actually a young woman) from a nearby district, one of those
romances from afar; never mind that he?s never actually met her.  This
distance from the object of his desires is not so much real as
telescopic, because the world for him spreads out from a bedroom that
looks over his town, which he studies daily with his binoculars ? a
gift of his uncle.  Everything seems close, and possible.

His foreshortened, youthful point of view is tempered by a few harsh
realities. Even though the war has been over for years now, Japan is
still trying to get up on its feet, and sometimes tiny businesses like
?sh-sellers are the hardest hit. Orders are down from the old days,
and is Koichi?s father isn?t as energetic as he once was. In fact,
when dad collapses one day, the family has no reserve funds to get a
solid diagnosis much less ?nd a good doctor to treat him; and as
Koichi?s father spends more and more days sick in bed, the
responsibility for keeping the family business going falls
increasingly falls on his young shoulders.

Certainly his ?ckle older sister Toyoko isn?t going to help. She?s
married one man for money, but callously goes out with her former
boyfriend in broad daylight. Both men love Toyoko?s beauty, but
inside, she?s so icy and calculating you wonder what family she came
from. And under Koichi, there?s Kazue and Kin, a sister and brother
who are in no position to be anything but burdens to the family.

>From here, Clouds at Twilight tosses as many travails at Koichi as it
can muster. He?s always had a special attachment to his sister, but
his good-hearted, childless uncle has offered to adopt her out of the
family.  With father so ill, adoption isn?t so much an option as an
inevitability. Koichi?s long-distance, one-way romance by telescope is
stopped in its tracks when he and his best friend trek across the
city; they discover that the girl?s not only chronically ill, but just
about to be married and driven away to her new home far away. Around
that time, Koichi?s father dies, and Koichi?s mother has no choice but
to adopt her two children out to their uncle. When the boy?s best
friend is to move north to Hokkaido, the two realize they?ll never see
each other again. And now Koichi is fated to become a ?sh seller, the
result of a death-bed pledge -- a thing he swore to himself would
never happen.

In establishing shots, Keisuke Kinoshita frames the boy?s world
between rows of wooden shacks and crowded buildings. There?s really no
escape from the cramped inevitability of his life even in spite of his
dreams, and even though the ?lm goes a little far in pulling at
heart-strings, the construction of the melodrama couldn?t be more
perfect. In early scenes, we see Koichi at thirty years, an adult
having taken his father?s place; and in the ?nal sequence, we see the
child become a man, willing to give up on his old dreams once and for
all as he bears it for a more realistic future. Despite what came
before, everything turns out well enough.  There is, however,
something tragic -- like a culminating death -- in Koichi resigning
himself to fate.