Sho Miyake’s manga-inspired diptych is a visual exercise in precision and tranquility.
Sho Miyake arrived at the 55th edition of New York’s’ New Directors/New Films as not just a veteran of the festival (having previously debuted with the 2022 Small, Slow But Steady) but as the most recent winner of Locarno’s Golden Leopard. The Japanese director has made a name for himself as an artist armed with a signature devotion to the earnest and the sincere, taking ambitious leaps towards emotional territory oft-associated with the cloying landscape of commercial cinema. Miyake’s work of course is anything but, and his win at Locarno signals that contemporary independent cinema sensibilities (or some segment of them) may be seeking refreshing new terrain.
His latest work – Two Seasons, Two Strangers – derives from legendary manga artist Yoshiharu Tsuge’s A View of the Seaside and Mr. Ben and His Igloo, combining both works to create an understated contrast of moods that in turn redound to a sumptuous composition of complex emotional hues. The film’s first half luxuriates in the melancholic rhythms of a seaside summer – conjuring images of Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale in a subtle exploration of alienation and human connection. But where Rohmer’s camera wanders and idles at the pace of its characters, Miyake takes a meditative approach in his foregrounding of the verdant lush and deep blues that envelop the two leads, the rhythms of the natural world creating the tonal contours through which each wends their way.
The visiting Nagisa finds herself drifting from a lover and his friends, meandering across the coastal topography until a chance encounter with local Natsuo. What unfolds is a delicate, nearly imperceptible romance that evokes the unsaid as a permeating erotic force. A swim in the rain, a meal shared on the beach, confessions at twilight – familiar images that are elevated by Miyake’s profound regard for spatial, environmental interplay; an exploration of the interstices inherent to moments of authentic connection and contemplation.
The film’s second half draws our attention to the concentric layers of the artistic process, centering the screenwriter Li as she seeks colder climates in the wake of a recent production (one that serves as the basis for Two Seasons’ philosophical instincts). Thrust into the jarring reality of her own chance encounter, Li’s experience unmistakably holds a mirror to her own creative vision and that of Miyake himself. The landscape here is clinical, serene, and unblemished by outward human disorder. But the physical spaces that Li and her counterpart inhabit seem somehow intimate, opaque, and gently chaotic. What exists between these poles of material experience seems to point towards the ineffable, and it is this subliminal space where Miyake’s film finds its undeniable emotional resonance.
