Sho Miyake is one of the finest, most soulful Japanese filmmakers of his generation. His latest features, all patient drama about circumstance relationships, share a convincing interest in silence. Not necessarily calm; Almost every Miyake -Bly is directly depressed or a bundle of nerves about important issues in their lives.
Rather, he benefits characters who struggle with loneliness and withdraw from people much at all because of factors that make human connection more difficult for them. “All long nights” saw two office workers suffering from various harmful conditions constitute a supportive bond to facilitate their respective pain. And in Miyake’s wonderful, LO-Fi takes a sports film, “small, slow but steady”, the silent performance of its young boxer staff is due to a literal hearing loss. She reads lips to understand people while choosing not to formulate many of her inner thoughts.
In Miyake’s latest tender, beautifully structured function (that just won Locarno’s highest honor, Golden Leopard), “Two seasons, two strangers”, the main character’s tendency to say very little is anchored in a creative decline, intertwined with cultural isolation. Li (Shim Eun-Kyung, “Train to Busan”) is a Korean screenwriter for film And TV, experienced author blocks and struggles to still join her surroundings in Japan, where she has been based for several years. In a question and answer session, she seems afraid to answer the first question, which indicates that her main takeaway from looking at her own work is that she does not have much talent.
Within her own mind, she is a little more articulated. Japanese is the only language that leaves Li’s mouth, but her temporary internal monologues are in her native language, the most crucial example that expresses her growing conflict with themselves to write herself.
“Things happen in life that can’t be put in words,” she thinks. “Surprise and confusion blow me far away. I just want to stand there forever, far away from words. But words always grab me without failing. Everyday life is about naming things and feelings around us and mixing in. When I first came to Japan, everything was full of mystery and fear. Things and emotions that used to be fresh now have been exaggerated.
Traveling to get away from the noise from city life, hoping that it can provide greater clarity or purpose, both run female protagonists in Miyake’s film of two distinct halves. Contrasting Li, whose journey occurs in winter, is Nagisa (Yuumi Kawai, “Desert of Namibia”), a young Japanese woman walking on a city city in the summer. When she avoids the tourist traps, she connects, albeit awkwardly, with Natsuo (Mansaku Takada), a similar lone soul visiting her relatives nearby.
Miyake’s “All The Long Nights” was adapted from a novel by Maiko Seo and “Small, Slow but steady” was loosely based on the autobiography of boxer Keiko Ogasawara. With “Two seasons, two strangers”, the author/director again draws inspiration from previously published material, although his transition to Manga to Live-Action may act as a curve ball, the creator he adapts an ideal match for the filmmaker’s skill of bringing real interiors to Fabl-like stories.
The extremely influential caricature artist and essayist Yoshiharu Tsuge is regarded as the first manga artist who has broken his personal life for storytelling material, along with being the first to make his characters’ internal conflicts to the central focus in his stories – something unusual in the medium in the late 1960s Geckish Style of Japanese series aimed at adult audiences. His introspective works would range from stories of ordinary life to more open surrealism, their atmospheres that are dotted with dream, eroticism and mysterious tensions.
“Two seasons, two strangers” adjusts loosely two specific manga novels of Tsuge. When mating the otherwise uncoupled series, Miyake doesn’t really follow the template for Jacques Audiard’s gets “Paris, 13th District,” who interwoven the plots with three previously separate short stories by American caricature artist Adrian Tomine. Rather, to begin with, Miyake Li makes the screenwriter an adaptation of Tsuge’s 1967 “scenes from the sea.”
The film opens at Li at its desk and quietly prepares how to start your script first scene. Only occasional cuts to Li who write a few more words, about the first 35 minutes of “two seasons, two strangers” are spent a while on “scenes from the sea”, with the above characters in Nagisa and Natsuo.
The volatile but fulfilling chance meeting between the two young people alone has the air in a meeting story, and there is really a romantic feeling for how their situation develops. After the first meeting on a secluded beach stretch, they spend the rest of the day going and talking, planning a second hangout at the same beach site the following day. When a typhoon hits the city, none of them are discouraged from honoring their plans. Protected by a hut, he sits waiting for her when heavy showers surround him. When she shows up, they share dessert he brought with him, both wearing what they would have anyway if the sun had kept brilliant, to the extent that Nagisa has a bikini ready under her dress to swim with Natsuo in the rainy sea.
Despite the seemingly sweet resolution on their story (and a seemingly optimistic last line with dialogue), there is a strange undercurrent to Nagisa and Natsuo segment that suggests that the precedent is as much as potential happiness – a mysterious tension that suits the creator like Miyake is adaptation. For one thing, their theoretically sensual swimming occurs in stormy weather, the camera operator in the water with the actors who are clearly beaten by the waves and heavy rain. Elsewhere, part of their binding is based on Natsuo who shares a gloomy childhood anecdote to see the bodies of drowning victims.
Within the universe of “two seasons, two strangers”, the dark layer of the film within-a-film can be read as a reflection of Li’s desperate mind. The rest of Miyake’s film finds Li years after her TSUGE adaptation was written, still stuck to the idea of traveling from the story of Nagisa and Natsuo when she struggles to write another project – apparently about Ninjas. The magical structural trick that Miyake pulls with Li is that she herself is the protagonist in another Tsuge story: an adaptation of “Mr. Ben and his igloo.”
On Tsuge’s Page, this story touches on a male manga artist in search of inspiration, travels to a remote village and lives with an eccentric innkeeper (barely) who runs a company on the outskirts. In Miyake’s film, Li finally travels away from the city to deal with both burnout and the aftermath of a sudden tragedy and tests a deserted Mountain Inn which is powered by cynical benzo (Shinichi tsutsumi), after all other alternatives in the snow draped city lack vacant places. The couple’s originally stiff but gradually hot chats oaks and reinforces them from Li’s previous script, including binding over an understanding of deep loneliness.
The structure of the film’s low, poetic resolution is done, the more moving by Shim’s intelligent performance, which is effectively informed by the actor’s position between two languages throughout, giving her a platform and reason to convey additional emotional shades without the dialogue artist, in one sentence, also breaks free from “a cage” as her character.
When we practice things for the next chapter in our lives, we could all stand out to get out of our own heads more to appreciate and take inspiration from the opportunities ahead of us, instead of overtaking and then overcocalizing our worries and doubts to blocking our progress. To nod to a famous song that, like Miyake’s filmmaking, suggests that you enjoy the silence where possible, sometimes words are very unnecessary.
Rating: B+
“Two seasons, two strangers” premiered at 2025 Locarno International Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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