Singaporean film-maker Anthony Chen brings warmth, sympathy and directness to this intimate drama set in Yanji on China’s border with North Korea. Three young people – two men and a woman – make a connection; each are looking for a way of breaking free from the emotional deep-freeze they’ve landed themselves in, just as the whole world wants to thaw itself out of the vast stagnancy created by the Covid pandemic.
At its best, this movie has the easy and seductively unencumbered swing of the French New Wave, with something of Godard’s Bande à Part. That film was surely on Chen’s mind when he created a scene in which his three characters have a crazy dare about who can steal the biggest book from the bookstore that they’re listlessly drifting through; a wild, giggling dash leading to a chaotic and humiliating denouement. But some plot points and characterisations are left unresolved or anticlimactically closed down; there’s some jeopardy about a North Korean criminal at large which is bafflingly dispensed with. The narrative meltwater makes things a bit soggy, and there is a frankly peculiar flourish of CGI in the woodland wilderness of the Changbai mountains that didn’t really get us anywhere, and jarred with the low-key realist immediacy of everything else. All three performances, however, are tremendous.
The film starts in Yanji in winter, a city home to a large ethnically Korean population. Chen begins with an intriguing shot of ice-blocks being cut and carted away to form the walls and avenues of a tourist-attraction maze; the metaphorical possibilities of all this are left reasonably unemphasised. Haofeng (Liu Haoran) is a shy, bespectacled young man from Henan who is visiting to attend the wedding of a schoolmate. He has a neurotic, faintly self-harming habit of munching ice cubes; when a caller to his mobile reminds him about a mental health therapy appointment he repeatedly and curtly announces they have the wrong number.
On a rather grim bus trip around the local sights and cultural craft centres, Haofeng is befriended by the tourist guide, Nana (Zhou Dongyu) who affectionately teases and befriends this lonely and unhappy-looking guy. When he catastrophically loses his phone (an accident perhaps subconsciously willed by his reluctance to get any more calls from the mental health clinic), she takes pity on him and impulsively asks him to come along for a drink she’s having that night with the guy who manages the restaurant to which she brought the tourists. This is Han Xiao (Qu Chuxiao), a moody, macho guy who has been exasperating Nana with his periodic drunken, and questionably sincere, declarations of love. The three have a kind of love adventure à trois; Haofeng is to discover Nana’s past and the sporting career she abandoned before she became a tourist guide, a (somewhat contrived) secret which comes out when they have sex. As for Han Xiao, his own family background is weighing on him, and for him also Yanji is a prison of ice.
There are some great scenes, strong images, nice setpieces and Chen triangulates the sexual tension interestingly. The Breaking Ice is not as absorbing or fully realised as his award winning debut Ilo Ilo, but his film-making has an arresting fluency and openness.
• The Breaking Ice screened at the Cannes film festival.
