“I’m in a cage of words.”

Sho Miyake is a director that, within his limited oeuvre, has always sought to craft subtle, yet moody psychological drama. In 2018, he delivered And Your Bird Can Sing, a drama depicting the struggle to bring one’s subjectivity in play within relations. Small, Slow but Steady (2022), on the other hand, bought the memoir of deaf pro-boxer Keiko Ogasawara with much pathos and psychological sensibility to life. And, in 2024, All the Long Nights explored the way symptoms interfere with relational functioning.

Miyake’s latest film, Two Seasons, Two Strangers, an adaptation of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s mange short stories A View of the Seaside and Mr. Ben and His Igloo, offers a fresh, yet familiar take on Miyake’s main preoccupation: the question of subjectivity and speech. Miyake’s moody frame of natural beauty emphasizes and singles out, with refined elegance, the grimy equivocal nature of speech.  

 

Sho Miyaki opens his narrative with a shot of screenwriter Li (Shim Eun-kyung), seated at her desk, thinking. Eventually she pens down the title of the first scene of her adaptation of Yoshiharu Tsugu’s manga Scenes from the Seaside: summer, seaside. The story recounts the chance encounter between Nagisa (Yumi Kawai) and Natsuo (Mansaku Takada) on a nearly deserted beach. 

After the screening of the film at a university, she confides in professor Uonuma (Shiro Sano) that the current script she is writing is not going well. He advices her to take a trip for a change of scenery. Not long after this conversation and an unfortunate occurrence, she decides to take heed his words and travels to Shonai.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers explores the effect of the encounter, the effect of exchanging signifiers with another subject. With his narrative, Miyake elegantly shows that speech addressed to an Other ebbs and flows from the imaginary to the symbolic level. We do not merely contend ourselves with empty speech – i.e. the chit-chatting to keep the flame of conversation alive and evoke a sense of sameness, but also seek to utilize this Other as a frame to direct fragments of full speech to.

Generally speaking, the Other does not respond, the Other’s ego does. We purposefully miss the Otherness of the Other subject – we do not want to know. We flee into the imaginary, impose meaning onto the Other and erect a deceptive sense of understanding upon a structural foundation of misunderstanding. The purposeful missing of the Other as subject, however, lays bare the fundamental solitude of the subject.

The fabric of the conversations within Two Seasons, Two Strangers also show that what appears as merely empty speech often is nothing more than revised and defused full speech – signifiers pin-pointing to a certain subjective truth, e.g. Nagisa asking Natsuo if he ever cheated on someone. The way the film for which Li wrote the script ends offers a compelling case for how empty speech can be the vehicle of refused and repressed desires and fantasies. 

The second encounter within the film happens between Li and Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi), the proprietor of the old-inn in the mountains. Miyake proves, with this encounter, that the question invites the individual to make himself present within his speech as subject, to fill the emptiness of chit-chat with the subjective weight he carries along. However, he also reaffirms that our unconscious directs our speech – e.g. Benzo’s request to write about the inn – and that Otherness is something subjects shy away from (Narra-note 1).

However, Miyake ultimately affirms that such encounters – two bodies meeting, signifiers circling, Otherness avoided – nevertheless sorts subjective effects. While one can fight back against the Otherness of the other subject in the exchange of signifiers, while one can revel oneself in the bath of misunderstanding, one cannot avoid the acts and signifiers of the Other to have effect on one’s own subjectivity, one’s own unconscious. An encounter, as Two Seasons, Two Strangers beautifully evokes, always produces something, by it a lingering darkens to be acted upon or a flint to enflame the act of creation.  

Sho Miyake brings Two Seasons, Two Strangers visually to life by crafting a composition with a deeply meditative pace. This pace is not only created by thoughtfully concatenating static and restraint dynamic shots together, but also by relying on long takes (Cine-note 1).

It is evident from the way Miyake approaches his imagery that he invites the spectator to slowly inhale the seasonal atmosphere as well as the performances, to position himself within the seasonal frame and take his time to read the presence of the characters – their acts, their emotional expressions, and the way they bring the signifier into play. Miyake’s restraint compositional rhythm plays an important role in enabling the various atmospheric elements (i.e. the rolling waves, the wind, rustling of leaves, the rain, the passing train, …) to envelop the spectator and give the contextual frame a near tangible presence.  

Sho Miyaki opts for a 4:3 aspect ratio to bring Two Seasons, Two Strangers visually alive. While, at first glance, this kind of frame seem nothing more than a stylistic choice – a choice that allows him to use geometry more elegantly for his shot-compositions, it becomes Miyake’s chose the box-frame to visually invite the spectator to focus on bodily presence and the subtleties of emotional expressions.

However, the aspect-ratio also has a thematical function. The boxed frame also helps Miyaki to heightens the impact of evocative imagery within his composition. In the case of long take that follows the rock formations along the sea-side, for instance, the aspect-ratio amplifies the claustrophobic imprisonment that Nagisa feels as subject – the weight (of her past, of her desire) she carries along; the feeling of being boxed-in by her past, her desire. 

Miyake, moreover, decorates his film with moody sensual musical accompaniment, breathing a subtle eroticism in the tension between the imaginary surface of our speech and the unconscious desires and fantasies that coils underneath.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers offers a moody experience that explores the tension between one’s conscious discourse and one’s unconscious discourse with elegance and arresting beauty. However, as Miyake’s film centres on conversational subtleties and silent observation, some spectators might struggle, especially in the second half, to make sense of what, due to exchange of signifiers, happens to the main character.

Notes

Cine-note 1: Sho Miyake makes a beautiful visual reference toYasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country (1946).

Narra-note 1: The subject avoids bringing his own Otherness in play in speech and tries to avoid the encounter with the Other subject’s Otherness.