Isolationism breeds a variety of affects that spur those involved toward indelibly discrete action. In many, Sho Miyake’s latest, Two Seasons, Two Strangers, courses the transformation of those actions into a certain ephemera: one desperate to cling to a crystallized form, which might render the mirror image necessary to confront this isolation and subside the bristling tensions that mount — perhaps a work of art, perhaps a consideration of love, perhaps a shared experience. Now, this isolation isn’t so much an enforced quarantine as it is an enigmatic estrangement, communication and community blurred as their aspirational qualities become lost and incalculable. Suddenly, the world is too unpredictable, and so inwards one escapes. Miyake sets this exploration against a structural gambit: a bifurcated parallel narrative, similar in manner to what we’ve seen in Hong Sang-soo or Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s filmography, though here the opening segment is a mise en abyme, in the form of the produced screenplay of our protagonist, Shim Eun-kyung’s Li, whose own misadventures in the film’s latter half echo the exploration for an unnamable openness that her screenplay seeks to both excavate and lament.
Miyake adapts Yoshiharu Tsuge’s Mr. Ben and His Igloo and A View of the Seaside, two manga with narratives that are repurposed to both fit within the same thematic confine. Miyake’s opening segment adapts A View of the Seaside, interpolating its unrequited yearning into Tsuge’s Mr. Ben and His Igloo, the story of a Manga artist lost simultaneously in his head and the countryside, exhibiting the ways in which our art projects the unattainable desires that rumble the nervous bellies of isolated individuals, those always just an arm’s reach from their wants. Miyake understands that these wants are unattainable because they have no intentions, they fill up the emptiness to excuse a vacancy. This is the thread that runs through both mangas. Much like the opening sequence’s characters (played with delicate melancholy by Yuumi Kawai and Mansaku Takada) as they discuss the peace to be found in a loitering without end, they also reach for one another in some quietly desperate attempt to cover up the listlessness which provoked this random encounter, one destined to end in the very estrangement that brought them together. It’s a beautiful, cyclical logic of escapism bearing a formal acuity that stages these strangers’ meeting against a landscape whose current remains incessant. Miyake’s cinematography is clearly both a nod to the beautiful illustrations of the source material and a recognition of how innately its imagery and the comparative scale of its compositional work perform to elicit this generous insight. The waves will keep crashing against the tide, subsuming those who stand in the way; the sun will always keep setting, stealing the light that illuminates those faces before you. It’s unfortunate, then, that this initial half, this affecting recontextualization, is far more alluring, articulate, and formally expressive than what is to follow.
A protracted static medium-wide climaxes the opening half: our two young characters express their conceptions of depression, boredom, and the possible methods to avoid or address these maladies. Behind them the sun sets, dusk into night, a stunning landscape swallowed up by the encroaching shadows. But this is also the film’s emotional climax, the entire second half a more direct and flattened exploration of the woes Shim’s diegetic screenwriter broods over. Abruptly making a trip to the countryside she writes, and therefore also fantasizes about, unable to find lodging and caught in writer’s block, she stumbles upon an intimate Inn, where she’ll need to make close acquaintance with its keeper, Benzo, whose accommodations are haphazard and ill prepared. The development of their relationship coincides with more explicit pronouncements regarding the shape of their sadness, encumbering the lush introductory text with a thudding literalism, which, while understandably tacit to the structural integrity of characterization across the work, also attenuates the complication coursing through the overarching dynamics. Miyake enforces a slight, pointed rendition of his themes in the adaptive process: a progression of reductionism. As it ends, the too simple reconciliation of creation-as-spirit envelops the emotional contradictions that gently unfurled prior, stifling resonance in favor of a clarity whose tidiness is dishonest to the logic of both characters and their narrative confines. Though, perhaps, as the title’s own literalism suggests, these unambiguous faculties could be the make-up of a stark realism constructed from the remnants of its escape. The simplicity could be just another gesture toward the inescapable circumstances our characters will continuously shamble through, like a willow tree’s always bowed branches as they sway in the wind. As a facilitated narrative, however, the edifice and its lingering attributes can neither stave off disappointment, nor provoke greater curiosity.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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