Berlin, Cannes, and Venice are considered the major European film festivals, holding on to a level of world renown rarely afforded to such institutions. While not meaning to question their importance, it's worth noting that they are far from the only celebrations of cinema happening around the Old Continent, nor are they the ones most welcoming to the challenging and the avant-garde. Rotterdam has them beat on that account, not to mention more non-fiction-focused events and, of course, the Locarno Film Festival. With their propensity for honoring cineastes like Pedro Costa, Albert Serra, and Wang Bing, the Swiss fest will always struggle to capture the attention of more conventional-minded cinephiles, but they deserve some love. Indeed, it's about time we counted the Golden Leopard on par with the Bear, the Palme, the Lion.
This year's victor was announced last weekend, as the festivities drew to a close at Piazza Grande, making Shô Miyake the fifth Japanese filmmaker to take Locarno's highest prize. And after all that talk about audacious artistry, it's worth noting that Two Seasons, Two Strangers is hardly radical. Nevertheless, it makes for a formally rigorous, moving, occasionally humorous look at the toll of loneliness through a graceful feat of mise en abyme…
What do you suppose is the most uncinematic art form? Writing, in all its permutations, would be my bet. After all, it's hard to make the matter of putting words into a blank page something visually dynamic, no matter the craft or floridness of one's découpage. Shô Miyake's Two Seasons, Two Strangers starts by facing this challenge head-on and, in some ways, challenging the audience in return. It all begins in the urban jungle of modern-day Japan, blocks of buildings flattened by Yuta Tsujinaga's camera into something halfway between abstract geometry and a patchwork quilt of concrete, asphalt, sun-facing windows, and telephone lines.
Within one of those buildings, Li despairs over her desk. She's a Korean expat in Japan, working as a screenwriter for film and TV, currently tasked with adapting a manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge. Miyake's presentation is almost bristling in its depurated form, lingering on actress Shim Eun-kyung as she pantomimes the writer's struggle and self-doubt. Aborted gestures aplenty, she moves her hands around and almost seems to contemplate a faraway mirage only she can see. When an idea is concrete enough to grasp, pen finally touches paper and a script blossoms on the page. Initially, the scene is dry and direct, clean in that manner, which inspires critics to mention Bresson.
It doesn't last long, though, for we soon plunge into the scene described by Li, and find a young woman waking up on the backseat of a car. A summertime sadness suffuses the screen, inspired by both verbal description and visions that paint the screen. From a flurry of green as the car drives past country landscapes to turquoise waves crashing into the shore, Two Seasons, Two Strangers exchanges minimalism for an impressionistic rush. Through it all, no matter how evocative the images may be, Li's words still describe the frame in voice-over. The mechanism becomes especially interesting when deployed as a means of characterization.
In that regard, it gives the audience access to interior lives that neither acting nor direction is eager to declare. That's true of the girl, named Nagisa, and a boy, called Natsuo, two lonely souls whose inability to connect extends to their film's audience, who must be told their feelings rather than intuit them by more traditional dramatic means. Since this is a movie, they must cross paths, drawn to each other across the seaside village turned tourist trap. If not by fate, it's the writer's will that moves them into the most disaffected meet-cute you ever did see.
You'll not confuse their walks and conversations for a romcom or Rohmerian stroll, as Nagisa and Natsuo are lost in themselves, trapped by the solipsism of their sadness even as they find solace in each other's company. They are mirrors and, more importantly, doubles, pointing to a structural and thematic shape that's even present in the film's English-language title. Because Two Seasons, Two Strangers isn't just about a summer by the sea. Halfway through, it cuts to a classroom where Li and her director show their work to film students. Shocking in the moment yet peaceful in its unraveling, the passage splits the narrative and propels Li to the next chapter of her tale.
It's a strange interlude, marked by a beloved professor's advice, his sudden death, and a twin mourning his brother. The second season starts in the darkness of a tunnel, a phantom train carries the burned-out writer up the mountains in winter, as far away from the summering seaside as possible. The blue water of her imagination is left behind for a blanket of white snow that threatens to efface the screen in absolute. That effacement may be what she's looking for. After all, Li wants to run away from words, to stand in the world and experience it without the nagging need to articulate it. But words are always there, inescapable, and Li's escape is futile.
She keeps looking at her surroundings with a voracious eye and a camera at the ready to register sources of inspiration for future work. Nothing simply exists in her vicinity, for it all represents a morsel of life to be cannibalized, digested, regurgitated on the page. There's no malice there, mind you, and the film never contemplates her with any sort of moralistic critique. Instead, Miyake looks for the gentlest of comedy in his protagonist's predicament, hinging the latter half of Two Seasons, Two Strangers on her relationship with Benzo, the grumpy owner of the only inn in town with an available bed – or futon, as the case may be.
The place is an anachronistic aberration, so old it looks displaced from a jidaigeki, like some cosmic joke at Li's expense. Its owner isn't much different, full of idiosyncrasies beneath a gruff exterior bound to melt under the warmth of an unlikely friendship. Or it'd be so in a more sentimental exercise. But that's not what Two Seasons, Two Strangers means to be, preferring an oddball restraint that can easily tip over into poetic musings. Just as the film within a film was based on Yoshiharu Tsuge's "A View of the Seaside," its second movement draws from the author's "Mr. Ben and his Igloo." The most significant divergence from the source material comes in the bridging of the two in that interlude.
There's also the switch of a mangaka for a screenwriter character whose internal conflicts are similarly irresolute and inconclusive, yet tied to the cinematic form in ways her comic book counterpart can't be. They form an intermedia corollary that sounds like a distorted echo, another double among all the others – strangers, seasons, siblings with the same face, stories by the same teller, written idioms and ponds meant for golden carps, images in actuality and in a camera's gaze. Consider a moment, back by the seaside, when Natsuo is photographed by an Italian tourist who wants him to act natural.
Yet, to capture what she'd consider natural, the foreigner must design the shot around a personal truth, lost in translation between herself and the model. His book is taken away, as are his sunglasses, eyes directed toward the sea to convey a wistfulness that doesn't match the discomfort the narrator describes from him. In essence, this moment shows the existence of two Natsuos, the real and the imagined by whoever looks upon him. It's another facet of solitude stemming from the essential unknowability of us all and the impulse to create fictions as our way of understanding the other. The photographer, considering Natsuo and Li contemplating Benzo, is the same note played twice.
And in juxtaposing them, Miyake crystallizes a particular kind of loneliness – encountering the present in the past tense – like few other directors today. That alone should justify his Locarno triumph, even if other contenders were just as superlative or even more formidable. Beyond such notions, there's also the grace with which he suggests character, sometimes erring on the side of unfinished sketches, and an appeal to classical form that makes him stand apart from other auteurs with comparable preoccupations, gambits – Hong comes to mind as does Dupieux. At least, that's what I felt as someone for whom Two Seasons, Two Strangers marked the first encounter with Miyake. It made a striking impression, let me tell you.
