Sho Miyake’s lovely, wispy, rumination-like Japanese film, Tabi To Hibi (Two Seasons, Two Strangers), based on two of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s mangas Mr. Ben and his Igloo and A View of the Seaside, is all about journeys we undertake through life, and into writing and filmmaking. It also underscores how some of the most significant connections and the most compelling of our jottings can happen through or emerge from chance encounters with strangers—unexpected, casual and fleeting.
Two Seasons, Two Strangers bagged the Golden Leopard at the recently concluded Locarno Film Festival and it’s not difficult to fathom why. Marked by Miyake’s distinctive observational skills and compassion and warmth for the human condition, the narrative coasts along leisurely with rhythmic beats and elegant patterns, making for a most soulful, tactile piece of cinema. The kind that doesn’t just render emotions palpable on screen but engages the audience in a way that they get to project and invest their own feelings on the protagonists. Real and reel paralleling each other.
At the centre here is the Korean screenwriter Li Shim (Eun-kyung). In the first segment, as she attempts to break free of the writer’s block, and tie-in with the alien Japanese culture she is in, the narrative keeps alternating between her thoughts and writings and the story of two lonely Japanese youngsters, Nagisa (Yuumi Kawai) and Natsuo (Mansaku Takada) who meet and spend a day with each other by the summery, sunny, but also cloudy, rainy sea. It’s their story that Li is struggling to give form on paper. They are the leads of her film.
Natsuo tells Nagisa a scary story from his childhood, about encountering the dead bodies of a drowned mother and child. She thinks it’s more a sad than scary tale. They have another rendezvous the next day, sharing a dessert and swimming in the turbulent sea, as the tingling romance, despite a seemingly happy end, also gets underlined with an inexplicable sense of doom. Life finds parallels in strange ways in fiction as Li also faces a sudden tragedy like Natsuo after a screening and analysis of the film.
While Li is uncomfortable discussing her own film writing with a bunch of students and their professor, her conversations with her inner self are lucid, resonant, particularly when it comes to her constant tussle with words. Something writers across the world will identify with. Like this long, introspective monologue: “Things happen in life that can’t be put into words. Surprise and bewilderment blow me far away. I want to just stand there forever, far away from words. But words always take hold of me without fail. Everyday life is about naming the things and feelings around us and blending in. When I first came to Japan, everything around me was full of mystery and fear. The things and feelings that used to be fresh have now been overtaken by words. I’m in a cage of words. Maybe travel is about trying to get away from words.”
As if on cue we see her travelling to a wintry, snowy wonderland in the second segment. A world distinctly apart, visually, in its colour palette and in terms of the weather, from the first. But she is still struggling with words, attempting to write another screenplay, this time on the ninjas. Unable to find accommodation in town, she is forced to stay in an old inn beyond the mountains run by Benzo (Shinichi Tsutsumi). Could that be a setting for her next film, he asks, as his own life appears to provide promising fodder. More significantly, just like Nagisa and Natsuo, after the initial hesitation, Li strikes a meaningful bond with Benzo. Life echoing fiction yet again in mysterious ways.
There is a sense of calm and quiet all through which masks the restlessness of the characters, their essential loneliness and disconnect from the world. All the actors have just the right measure of elegance, awkwardness and gruffness to reflect their characters’ alienation. For a film that talks a lot about words, it manages to say the most by saying very little.
The critique of the film within the film could well anticipate the reactions to Two Seasons, Two Strangers itself with some not able to get it and others taken in by its characters’ struggle to understand each other. Two Seasons, Two Strangers is not just about the wanderings in the world but travelling within. It is about all that awaits us out there and in the interiors of our souls. Viewing it is like being on a journey, suspended in time and space, that can help you come alive and reconnect with yourself again.