A portrait of writer’s block that, in its narrative approach, seems to reflect the boundless possibilities of a blank page, “Two Seasons, Two Strangers” is a film of loose ends, structural surprises and a general openness to the felicities of pouring rain and falling snow. Written and directed by Sho Miyake, it is based on two works by the renowned manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge, who died last month. But the ways in which Miyake interweaves the threads are anything but straightforward.
The movie opens with Li, a screenwriter of film and TV who is not originally from Japan (she is played by the South Korean actress Shim Eun-kyung), drafting the beginning of a scene. Miyake cuts from her notebook to the story she’s adapting from a Tsuge manga. It involves two strangers, Nagisa (Yuumi Kawai) and Natsuo (Mansaku Takada), who meet by chance on an isolated beach.
Their encounter has a melancholy backdrop (Natsuo shares a childhood memory from the area of seeing two corpses that had been caught in a fishing net), but Miyake confounds our expectations, and sense of time, when he returns to Li, whom we re-encounter fielding answers from students at a Q&A after a screening.
In the second half, Li, troubled by feelings of professional insufficiency, goes on an impulsive journey of her own, to a wintry village, where a lack of hotel space forces her to lodge with Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi). His mountain dwelling is, the film notes in one of its wryest moments, genuinely off the map.
Perhaps, Benzo suggests, Li could write about his inn. Li, carrying a camera she has inherited, appears to search for inspiration in her surroundings, too. Whatever elusive quality she is seeking, Miyake has found something like it. His film gently balances tidiness and looseness, connection and alienation and artifice and the natural world.
Two Seasons, Two Strangers Not rated. In Japanese and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters.
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