‘Two Seasons, Two Strangers’ Locarno Review: The Poetry of Fleeting Encounters

Two encounters, two seasons, two nationalities, two stories, two narrative layers. TWO SEASONS, TWO STRANGERS is a film built in doubles, weaving melancholy from chance meetings between characters, moments that exist both in fiction and in life. A beautiful and deeply human film, crafted with delicacy and intelligence, the new work by Sho Miyake — who had already made several films but only reached international recognition with SMALL, SLOW BUT STEADY (2022) — tells of fleeting connections that nonetheless have the power to change lives.

The protagonist is Li (Shim Eun-kyung), a screenwriter we first see struggling to write precisely that: the beginning of a film. Soon her scribbled words (in Korean) take shape on the screen, introducing us to Nagisa (Yūmi Kawai), a young woman wandering through a small seaside town, moving from the museum to the beach. There she encounters Natsuo (Mansaku Takada), a solitary young man sitting on the sand, gazing at the sea, trying to escape the tourists. Their conversation begins casually but quickly grows in detail, intimacy, and a certain sense of risk.

Then Miyake suddenly pulls back the curtain to reveal that what we’ve been watching is the film born from Li’s script, being screened at what appears to be a university. The film ends there, and Li, together with the director (played by Miyake himself), faces questions from a professor and students. Unexpected turns in this setting lead Li down surprising paths. Soon, we’re in the snow — and rather than another “fiction within fiction,” what unfolds is Li herself traveling to a tourist village, perhaps to write. With no hotel available, she ends up at a remote, desolate inn, where she strikes up an unusual relationship with its reclusive and somewhat surly owner, Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi), who draws her into an odd little adventure.

A quiet film, built from realistic yet poetic conversations, TWO SEASONS, TWO STRANGERS recalls the work of Hong Sangsoo, though it is far more visually elaborate. It emerges as an elegant, deceptively gentle portrait of characters. Deceptive because, behind the calm surface of these stories, every character is wrestling with difficulties: loneliness, uncertainty, or the question of what to do with their lives. The mid-film Q&A feels like the movie itself is asking aloud about its themes: sadness, solitude, darkness, drama, sensuality, and the power of words.

Travel, too, is one of the film’s central threads. Its stories unfold in remote towns, with characters largely cut off from others, and the idea of traveling defines the screenwriter’s own journey. “We travel to escape words,” she says at one point, trying to grasp how her life connects to her art and her supposed difficulty in finding stories. Later, Benzo asks her to write about him and his peculiar inn, only for him to realize it’s not such a good idea — because to do so would mean delving into places not everyone is willing to go. Least of all him.

Based on two graphic novels by Yoshiharu Tsuge (A View of the Seaside and Mister Ben of the Igloo), Miyake’s film explores those fleeting bonds that form between solitary people who, at least on the surface, may not be seeking or wanting them. From beach to snow, from notebook to screen, TWO SEASONS, TWO STRANGERS is one of those Japanese films whose marriage of image and music creates a uniquely melancholy tone, one that resonates by tracing connections between what happens on screen and the viewer’s own life. That kind of depth, that ability to tune into the audience’s sensitivity, belongs only to a select few filmmakers — those who know how to truly see, and those who prefer listening to speaking.