Two Seasons, Two Strangers

When combined, the diametric halves form a charming diptych whose thematic and emotional profundity make for Miyake’s most accomplished work yet.

Two Seasons is the rare film that begins with mundane clarity (remember, “scene 1, summer, seaside”) and works its way back, leaving you with the knottier stuff of life. Along the way, Li remembers what it’s like to have fun; the movie dutifully follows her lead.

Li, carrying a camera she has inherited, appears to search for inspiration in her surroundings, too. Whatever elusive quality she is seeking, Miyake has found something like it. His film gently balances tidiness and looseness, connection and alienation and artifice and the natural world.

In beautifully quiet ways, Two Seasons, Two Strangers captures its characters in the realm of the ineffable, making the mundane utterly sublime.

The build-up to the film’s low-key, poetic resolution is made all the more moving by Shim’s intelligent performance, which is effectively informed by the actor’s positioning between two languages throughout, giving her a platform and reason to convey additional emotional nuances without dialogue — the performer, in a sense, also breaking free from “a cage of words” like her character.