Quiet and unassuming, The Breaking Ice follows three dissatisfied twenty-somethings navigating a world that hasn’t turned out the way they expected. Written and directed by Anthony Chen, and featuring excellent lead performances, it is a delicate but beguiling film that operates on a different level than mainstream Chinese dramas.
The story takes place in Yanji, a city near the border with North Korea, during what looks like an endless winter of grim skies and frigid nights. Haofeng (Liu Haoran) is visiting from Shanghai for a wedding. Nana (Zhou Dongyu) leads tour groups when she isn’t blackout drinking. Xiao (Qu Chuxiao), who has been pining for Nana, feels trapped working at his relatives’ restaurant.
The three meet when Hao misplaces his phone while taking Nana’s tour. With no bank card access, he can’t pay his diner bill. When Nana helps out, Hao ends up drinking at her apartment with Xiao. Missing his flight home means touring Yanji with the other two. Hours stretch into days.
Writer and director Anthony Chen fills in complex back stories for his three leads. All three struggle with depression. In fact, Hao’s phone may be missing because he doesn’t want to answer the doctors phoning him from a mental health facility.
An accident in Nana’s past has left her frozen, unable to forget what happened or move forward. Xiao, the poorest of the three, dropped one bleak future for another. The other two could have prospects if they would accept them, but Xiao has little more than a motorcycle that is falling apart.
Chen places his characters in a relentlessly gloomy China of crowded highways and concrete high rises. Factories belch pollution, bars are bedlam, stores sell counterfeits, work is boring and tedious and hard.
Still, the three leads character are cunning enough to realize how they are being victimized. They turn to companionship as much as alcohol for relief, knowing that the only answers to their problems are bad choices. Chen brings a light touch to situations that in other hands would be hard to watch.
The model for The Breaking Ice, as with so many recent Chinese dramas, is An Elephant Sitting Still, Bo Hu’s 2018 drama about lost souls in a wintry industrial city in the north. That film used real locations and long, involved takes to immerse viewers in a reality so desperate that suicide seemed like a viable option.
Like The Shadowless Tower, a similar exercise in middlebrow depression, The Breaking Ice ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions. The three leads talk about “ending it all,” and occasionally one will totter on the edge of a great height, but Chen doesn’t believe that you can’t find solutions. Like Truffaut (whose Jules et Jim is a touchstone here), Chen is an optimist with elegantly pessimistic traits.
If you can’t make up your mind about The Breaking Ice, consider Zhou Dongyu, one of the finest performers working in Asian cinema. Zhou has starred in landmark films like Soul Mate and Better Days, and elevated comedies like This Is Not What I Expected. She is an extraordinary beauty and an exceptional actress, capable of conveying conflicting emotions with the simplest gestures. Liu Haoran and Qu Chuxiao are capable and attractive, but Zhou is magnetic, heartbreaking, utterly assured.
Credits: Director/Screenplay: Anthony Chen. Producers: Meng Xie, Anthony Chen. Director of photography: Yu Jing-Pin. Production Designer: Du Luxi. Costume Designer: Li Hua. Sound Designer: Zhe Wu. Editors: Hoping Chen, Soo Mun Thye. Original Music: Kin Leonn. Cast: Zhou Dongyu, Liu Haroran, Qu Chuxiao.
Photos courtesy Canopy Pictures, Huace Pictures, Rediance
