MANSAKU TAKADA, YUUMI KAWAI IN TWO SEASONS, TWO STRANGERS

SHO MIYAKE: TWO SEASONS, TWO STRANGERS (2025) - NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2026

TRAILER

Intimacy of loners

That the Japanese cinematic personality is about as subtle as it can get is illustrated by Sho Miyake's low-keyed but sophisticated diptych, which cunningly links two short 1960s manga stories, "A View of the Seaside" and "Mr. Ben and His Igloo" by revered manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge. The linking figure is a film and TV writer called Li (Eun-kyung Shim), a Korean expat who lives and works in Japan where and speaks fluent Japanese but whose interior monologue and the MS we see her writing is in Korean.

We see her writing, stumbling for a start on a screenplay with the line, "Summer, seaside. A car at a dead end." It develops into a kind of idyl of a lonely (or loner) young man and woman (Mansko Takada and Yuumi Kawai). Then as she imagines it we turn out to be watching the finished film, in which the pair seem strongly attracted on this island where he lives and she visits. As throughout, the action is low key but the atmosphere is intense. It's summertime and the sea is turbulent, windy, and a storm threatens (this is where Takamitsu Kawai’s intricate sound design first becomes evident). And then we turn out to be watching the film with a group of film students. Though Li is full of self doubt, replying to a question that seeing the film this way makes her feel she doesn't have much talent, an elder in the audience is encouraging when he declares the film to be romantic, erotic, even sexy. Somewhat later, however, we learn this helpful gentleman and mentor has passed away.

A trip to recover from that loss and from a for-hire effort leads to the second half of the film, which focuses on Li's own actual experiences, though she is still in the role of screenwriter, with pad and pen at hand. It's wintertime now, and the location is near mountains and gloriously, picturesquely snow-covered ones; this is where, if not before, the important contribution of DP Yuta Tsukinaga becomes much in evidence, for the way he renders velvety snow in the nighttime has never been more inviting, dark, and rich. Li is searching for location material, or story ideas, or just experience, and she finds all that when lack of a reservation leads her to go up higher above the little tourist town to an old inn where there turns out to be nobody else but her and the gruff innkeeper, Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi).

While the film as a whole may be seen as about loners, Li the writer being loner-in-chief, this is also a look at the Japanese personality that's both in-depth and fresh, seen at one remove through the semi-assimilated Korean Li. Her young couple on the island are notable for their lack of what we think of as the usual Japanese reserve, their asking very personal questions of each other straight off. The students at the screening Q&A are similarly direct. And the dialogue between Li and Benzo doesn't beat around the bush. He doesn't hesitate to ask her plenty of questions. She asks him the most cutting one of all: She understands inns like this are usually family affairs, she says. so why is he running it alone? She will learn, and in so doing will quickly be drawn into his sphere, almost become an accomplice.

When Li isn't trying futilely to sleep with Benzo's loud snoring in the same big room, a lot of the focus is on stealing valuable carp from a nearby tank that turns out to belong to the family of the innkeeper's estranged wife.

This is definitely short story, not novel, material, and even seems somehow familiar. But the key is the righteous, finely crafted filmmaking, which endows everything with layers of meaning and a richnness of cinematic style that make watching Two Seasons, Two Strangers an experience you may want to linger over and repeat, appreciating the tactile sense of the actual while savoring abstract parallelisms and contrasts as well. Miyake makes everything count double here in a film where clearly less is more, an esthetic once again native to Japanese culture at which this filmmaker excels. A gem.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers 旅と日々, 89 mins., premiered at Locarno, winning the top prize Golden Leopard. Screened for this review as part of New Directors/New Films (Apr. 8-19, 2026). Showtimes:
Friday, April 17,
8:45 PM Walter Reade Theater
Q&A with DIRECTOR Sho Miyake
Sun, April 19 3:00 PM MoMA Tutus Theater
Q&A with DIRECTOR Sho Miyake

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.