Scattered Clouds / Two in the Shadow (Mikio Naruse, 1967) (Patreon)

As I mentioned at the end of my notes on Wife! Be Like a Rose!, Naruse certainly paid attention to the groundbreaking work that Douglas Sirk was doing in the 1950s. The complex interplay of melodramatic conventions and evolving gender ideologies that was visible in Wife!, but often irreconcilable, is masterfully handled in Naruse's final film. Openly built on contrivance and coincidence, Two in the Shadow examines desire as a force that stands little or no chance in the face of guilt and social disapprobation. 

Naruse perfectly captures the unexpected way in which tragedy strikes. For the first five minutes or so, Two in the Shadow looks to be a film about cultural adaptation and the postwar links between Japan and the West. Hiroshi (Yoshio Tsuchiya) meets his wife Yumiko Yōko Tsukasa) in an upmarket café to celebrate his promotion. He works for the Ministry of Economy, and has just accepted a post in Washington, D.C., as a financial advisor at the Japanese embassy. He kids Yumiko about the fact that she needs to brush up on her English, and the stage is set for a comedy-drama of culture shock.

But a different shock arrives. Hiroshi is hit by a car and killed while on a business trip. At his funeral, we meet Mishima (Yūzō Kayama), the man who lost control of his car after a tire blowout and killed Hiroshi. Against his bosses' wishes, he goes to the funeral to offer apologies and condolences, and Yumiko, along with Hiroshi's father, throw him out. Once emotions have cooled, Yumiko's sister-in-law Katsuko (Mitsuko Mori) arranges a meeting between Yumiko and Mishima. Although the courts have cleared him of any wrongdoing, he insists on providing Yumiko with a monthly stipend to help her get by, and at Katsuko's insistence, she accepts. (Plus, Hiroshi's family legally cuts Yumiko out of their family, thereby usurping her husband's death benefits.)

Then, despite Yumiko's attempts to avoid Mishima, they keep running into each other. Some of this is by design, as Mishima appears to be waiting around for forgiveness that is not forthcoming. But in other cases, they just keep finding themselves in the same place. In trying to make a new start, Yumiko returns to her hometown, Lake Towada, where her sister Ayako (Mitsuko Kusabue) runs an inn. But as it happens, Mishima's company transfers him out of the Tokyo office to avoid bad publicity, sending him to a remote field office in... Lake Towada.

Ayako's inn is the favored spot of Mishima's clients, and so Yumiko is in the awkward position of serving him food and drink several times. But something strange happens. The combination of loneliness and circumstance results in Yumiko and Mishima becoming cordial to one another. And when Mishima develops pneumonia, Yumiko is the one who is there to nurse him back to health. (In his delirium, Mishima makes overtures of tenderness toward Yumiko that, in his right mind, he'd probably have kept to himself.)

Just as the situations that brought Yumiko and Mishima together in the first place were unlikely, the circumstances that tear them apart are equally rooted in utter chance. Naruse puts Yumiko and Mishima through a narrative grinder, but not out of any malice. Two in the Shadow redoubles the social pressures that so often constrain his characters with an almost supernatural connection, one that dispenses more bad luck than good. The couple is ostensibly free to make their own choices. But they are cast as magnets that continually shift in polarity, first attracting and then repelling the other. As a final film, Two in the Shadow is a rather remarkable statement, in that constraints of decorum, fully internalized by the widow and the inadvertent killer, have become inseparable from trauma. Two in the Shadow seems to be Naruse's Magnificent Obsession, but it eventually mutates into his Vertigo.