‘The Breaking Ice’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr. Anthony Chen. China. 2023. 97mins.

The print is hardly dry on Anthony Chen’s Sundance title Drift, which saw the Singaporean film-maker travel to Liberia with Cynthia Erivo and Alia Shawkat, than the peripatetic film-maker is off again — to China’s far north, for another look at the intense highs and lows of friendship; this time a spontaneous short-lived connection between three young people in the city of Yanji. Chen makes much of the frozen vistas of Jilin Province – of the ice itself – and the fact that the city is almost half-Korean, housing an independent Korean prefecture. In fact, as the trio ventures towards the sheer beauty of Changbai Mountain and Heaven Lake, there’s a lot to look at; albeit disappointingly little to digest.

Chen is certainly trying things out here, and that includes the influences of other directors

After winning the Camera D’Or a decade ago for Ilo Ilo (which played in Director’s Fortnight), Chen has both gone back to the source (2019’s Wet Season) and restlessly moved around, like all three of his protagonists in The Breaking Ice. You can never escape the feeling that these are three people whose connection – if not their very existence – is purely for the purpose of a film shoot. Chen certainly captures their energy, although the restlessness of youth in today’s China owes much to the techniques of the French New Wave (there’s a whole bookstore sequence which pays tribute to Godard’s Bande A Part). The actors are reasonably charismatic and the film grows increasingly lovely to look at, while failing to really make a case for itself beyond the superficial pleasures.

Whether or not the market can assimilate two Anthony Chen features in one year remains to be seen, but his casting should see The Breaking Ice do well in China at the very least. (Rediance is handling world sales while its owner, Meng Xie, co-produced with Chen under their Canopy label.) Zhou Dongyu (Better Days) worked with Chen on his contribution to the Cannes 2021 portmanteau film The Year of the Everlasting Storm, and her light burns brightly here as Luona (or Nana), a professional tour guide in the city with a bad injury to her ankle and a mysterious past.

Love Will Tear Us Apart’s Qu Chuxiao has the film-star presence to sell an under-written role as Han Xiao, a sometime suitor of Nana, who has come to Yanji to help in his aunt’s vegetable shop. Liu Haoran (Detective Chinatown) completes the trio and is perhaps its weakest link as the enigmatic, often suicidal, always timid Haofeng, in town for a wedding. Haofeng is fond of chewing ice cubes, and Chen’s sound team is equally fond of amplifying that noise.

They form a team, fuelled by drink and a little bit of lust, and take to roaming about the city. They’re a little bit lost, all a long way from home (Haofeng hails from Henan, not even Shanghai, so he’s doubly dislocated), characteristic of a generation of young Chinese, uprooted and restlessly seeking out their fates in a vast and open country. Kin Leonn captures the feeling well in his score, which roams easily from neo-folk to expansive electronic.

Before setting out for Changbai Mountain, when the film becomes a pure and delicate travelogue, the trio weave around town, talking about bears (soon to manifest in reality) and tigers, doing brilliantly cinematic things such as getting lost in an ice maze, or going to a zoo or a statue park and imbibing the influence of Jia Zhangke’s The World. Chen is certainly trying things out here, and that includes the influences of other directors, although his visual pairing of Chinese paintings with reality make the desired impact.

A half-baked subplot involving a North Korean thief seems pointless, and while Nana’s ice-skating history at least gives her character some depth, it seems too rushed at the end to properly resonate.