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Two Seasons, Two Strangers (2025) Review

Director: Sho Miyake Runtime: 89 minutes Languages: Japanese and Korean audio; English subtitles Certification: PG (Singapore)

The film had already started when I entered the hall. I worried that I’d missed something important. But even with that initial concern, I found myself barely resisting against the lapses of microsleep that repeatedly hit me during the screening.

Two Seasons, Two Strangers has a film within a film. One takes place in a rainy summer and the other in a snowy winter. Both feature pairs of strangers connecting through their loneliness and melancholy. The summer story was “written” by the protagonist of the winter story, Li (Shim Eun-kyung), a Korean screenwriter working in Japan. Now, she struggles to write her next film. This slump is exacerbated by the sudden passing of her former professor (Shiro Sano), whose illness is implied through a debilitating coughing fit that attacks after he attends Li’s film screening. To get out of her funk, Li takes a trip to the snow-covered countryside.

As a(n aspiring?) writer myself, I was hoping to get more out of this film than I actually did. It was nice hearing Li express her writing struggles to the audience as, “The things and feelings that used to be fresh have been overtaken by words” and “I’m in a cage of words.” Well, I relate. And I also agree with the innkeeper (Shinichi Tsutsumi) who hosts Li when he opines that “a good work is how well it depicts human sadness.”

But apart from a few lines, Two Seasons, Two Strangers feels unengagingly empty. With its minimal dialogue, I suppose the film is trying to get away from words like Li is. So, something else must take its place. There’s not enough that does, however. I must’ve missed at least the first ten minutes, but from reading other reviews, it doesn’t seem there was much to miss. The visuals feel sparse because of how dimly-lit they were. Some were so dark that they were like how your bedroom might look right after switching off the lights: you can just make out the outlines of objects and not much more. Especially in a cold, dark cinema hall, I found myself in a setting conducive for sleep.

My experience of watching Miyake’s film made me think of something I read about Naoko Ogigami’s chill-out feature Glasses (2007). Before a screening of it at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, she issued the audience a sleep warning but suggested that nodding off is within the spirit of her film anyway.

Maybe nodding off is within the spirit of Two Seasons, Two Strangers too.

Rating: 2.5/5

Thank you to SGIFF for the Cinephile Pass that granted me access to this screening.

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True Love (2025) Review

Warning: Full spoilers ahead

Director: Huỳnh Công Nhớ Runtime: 16 minutes Languages: Vietnamese audio; English subtitles Certification: PG (Singapore)

I wasn’t sure how to appreciate True Love except through its creative use of the silent film form.

The short film depicts an unnamed guy and unnamed girl on a date, often talking about art. Inserted into scenes of their date are shots of the National Assembly Building of Vietnam and old war footage. Playing over the shots of the National Assembly House is a recording of a speaker calling on fellow artists to support the Communist Party and to punish those who dissent. Over the war footage, an old-school love song. At the end, the couple’s conversations seems to have stirred up something in the guy, who declares that he will continue composing and become a “useful member of society.” He then appears before a green screen and spins around like a helicopter as fog encloses him. Outside the café that the couple were just inside, the girl waves up at him and calls out well wishes.

During the few other silent films I’ve seen, I don’t remember putting much effort at all into figuring out what the characters might be saying and just waited for the dialogue intertitles to appear. Perhaps it’s because of the style of acting generally present in this type of film. Since the acting is theatrical, there isn’t much ambiguity about what emotions are being expressed. But True Love’s two actors have deadpan expressions almost all the way throughout the short. Combining this lack of expression with their absurd dialogue gave me room to imagine and guess at what the characters were saying.

During the post-screening Q&A at the 36th Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF), the director explained that he used the silent film form because taking away the characters’ voices was like a form of censorship. From the couple’s discussion about a banned film and that audio recording playing over the National Assembly House shots, I could tell that censorship is a theme of the film. But I don’t understand exactly what message it’s trying to convey.

Is the film focusing more on self-censorship? Its original Vietnamese title is Chân Tình, which appears to mean “true feelings” rather than “true love”, according to Wiktionary. It does seem that the guy had suppressed some artistic desires, as at the start of the short, he doesn’t lament the banning of a film like the girl does. He tells her to gaze at the falling leaves around them and uses this sight as a weird analogy to express that this is just the way things go. At the end though, his declaration that he will continue to compose—a practice he hadn’t even expressed interest in until now—suggests he’s been reinvigorated.

Well, even though I don’t get what True Love is saying, I can say that it’s the most fun I’ve had reading dialogue intertitles. I’m inspired.

Rating: 3.5/5

Thank you to SGIFF for the Cinephile Pass that granted me access to this screening and Q&A.