Locarno Film Festival<\/a> \u2014 a boon to the distribution prospects of this unassuming mood piece \u2014 \u201cTwo Seasons, Two Strangers\u201d is adapted by Miyake from \u201cMr. Ben and His Igloo\u201d and \u201cA View of the Seaside,\u201d two short 1960s works by revered manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge. The director and his DP Yuta Tsukinaga honor the material\u2019s original form with their crisp, panel-like Academy-ratio framing, while the disconnect between the two sources is deftly built into Miyake\u2019s own script, which opens on Li (Shim Eun Kyung), a Korean writer based in Japan, making a rudimentary start to a screenplay: \u201cSummer, seaside. A car at a dead end.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\tFrom there, we\u2019re immersed into the sparse story she\u2019s writing, following two young loners \u2014 Natsuo (Mansaku Takada) and Nagisa (Yuumi Kawai) \u2014 at respectively loose ends in a sleepy coastal town where he\u2019s visiting family and she\u2019s just idly visiting, each nursing their own sadness. There\u2019s a late-summer air of exhaustion to the place, where the threshing of strong winds through lush foliage vies with the dull roar of the ocean for prominence in Takamitsu Kawai\u2019s intricate sound design, while Tsukinaga paints in brilliant, pregnant blues, present in everything from sky and sea to Nagisa\u2019s chic, flimsy wrap dress and the undertone of the characters\u2019 skin on an unseasonally cool day. And that\u2019s before the strangers, having tentatively met on a deserted cove, go for a sensually saturated swim in a heavy rainstorm, the camera bobbing with them in the rowdy waves.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWhen people have too much free time, they think about things too much and get depressed,\u201d says Natsuo to Nagisa \u2014 better, perhaps, to act rashly and often, and reap the sensory benefits. With this observation, it would seem, Li is speaking through her characters: Depressive and adrift herself, she\u2019s both creatively blocked and at risk of becoming a passive observer in her own life. At a Q&A following a screening of the film we\u2019ve just dipped into, she dodges questions by flatly denying she any talent; later, asked what she\u2019s working on next, she admits a planned script about ninjas has come to a halt. \u201cThe things and feelings that used to be fresh have been been overtaken by words,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m in a cage of words.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat Li needs is the kind of journey on which she sets her characters, short on words and long on unfamiliar environs and feelings. With one graceful cut to black, several months pass; we emerge from darkness out of a railway tunnel on a train slicing through the brilliant white landscape of Japan\u2019s snow country in midwinter. Deposited at a small tourist town, Li finds much to snap with the camera she now devotedly carries everywhere, but no free hotel rooms; she\u2019s directed up the hill to a rustic, off-the-radar inn run by taciturn divorc\u00e9 Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi). He turns out to be something of a kindred spirit, likewise awaiting a new chapter in a life he\u2019s let run aground. <\/p>\n
\n\tTheir tentative bonding is the less sexy, more specifically wounded version of the brief encounter Li wrote in the film\u2019s first half. Creative fires are gently stoked; personal balance is restored. Miyake has a wonderful eye and ear for small, perfect details of everyday serenity: Steam rises off a bowl of udon noodles slurped in silence one frosty afternoon, while snow gives way underfoot with a pleasingly muffled crunch and grumble. Cages of words are unlocked with a look, a nod or the settled stance of a cat in the window. \u201cTwo Seasons, Two Strangers\u201d revels in the kinds of experiences that most storytellers wouldn\u2019t deem remarkable, though it unassumingly articulates what can be life-changing, or even life-saving, about them. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three years ago, Japanese director Sh\u00f4 Miyake enjoyed an arthouse breakthrough with his gorgeous, unconventionally delicate boxing movie…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,44825,206,71097,71098],"class_list":["post-108006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-locarno-film-festival","tag-movies","tag-sho-miyake","tag-two-seasons-two-strangers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}