Two Seasons, Two Strangers

Sho Miyake is one of the quiet magicians of contemporary cinema. In films like “Small, Slow but Steady” he was already developing a signature one might call a cinema “of the new shyness”: delicate observations, tentative gestures, characters who find in silence a dignity that an ever louder cinema often lacks. How healing and dreamily philosophical this stance can be is shown by his new film, “Two Seasons, Two Strangers”.

Based on a manga, the film tells of two encounters — one in summer, one in winter. On a beach a man and a woman meet, both unsettled, both thrown off course. But it stays a fleeting moment: they are characters who exist only in the screenplay that Lee, a Korean writer in Japan, is trying to write. In the second part Lee withdraws to the snowbound provinces and meets an eccentric landlord — and again silence and distance govern what passes between people. Yet in the snow and the icy quiet, trust comes into being: a language that makes writing possible. In between there is a wonderful episode with koi carp, perhaps the shyest cinematic adventure of the year. That Miyake won the Golden Leopard in Locarno with it is not only a sensation but a promise: this cinema of restraint has arrived at the centre of world cinema.