Singaporean director Anthony Chen proves the versatility of his unique cultural background as he shoots his first film in China, after making the Camera d’Or winner Ilo Ilo and TIFF-competing Wet Season in his home country and the English-language Drift in the UK. What a banner year he’s having, after debuting the latter Cynthia Erivo–starrer earlier in Sundance this year, and now The Breaking Ice in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Official Selection.
Chen pulls two key members from Better Days—Hong Kong nominee for the Best International Feature Film Oscar in 2019, though it is in reality a China production—mega starlet Zhou Dongyu and Taiwanese DP Yu Jing-Pin and unites them with blockbuster stars Liu Haoran and Qu Chuxiao for a decidedly un-blockbuster-like arthouse road trip movie. Zhou plays tour guide Nana with former dreams of Olympic-level figure skating, Liu plays Haofeng a depressed banker from Shanghai, and Qu plays Xiao, a helper cook in his aunt’s Korean restaurant. Together, this unlikely trio embarks on a series of escapades, wandering the freezing border between North Korea and China and searching for any purpose or meaning in life.
Every China production you see on the international film festival circuit begins with a glaringly green stamp of approval from the Chinese government’s censorship board, nicknamed the “dragon’s mark.” How on earth The Breaking Ice got its dragon’s mark is perhaps an even more intriguing story than the film itself. It was a shock to see explicit sex scenes, verbal references to homosexuality, and banned political phrases opposing the government in the film, and these, combined with brutal weather conditions in a foreign land, speak to the herculean effort Chen must have gone through to make his film.
Alas, there is still the dragon’s mark, and there are many places where you can sense some inhibitions, self-imposed or not. Most noticeably, Chen keeps suggesting a gay dynamic between the two male members of the triumvirate, at one point even putting the two of them alone in a hotel room, but he can never commit to it. As such, this is now an Y tu mamá también without the famous kissing scene, without the explosion of chemistry that the film is building towards, and as a result, the other, straight permutations of this love triangle that are indeed explored feel like an imbalance. Even more wasted yet impossible potential is the suggestion of a queer throuple or polyamory, or at least an unconventional rethinking of what romance can look like in China.
There is also a feeling of a tacked-on optimistic ending now present in almost every arthouse film coming from China these days, almost as an obvious sign of revolt and declaration. In fact, there is a point in the third act of the movie where it feels like the best place to end: Chen makes an explicit reference to the「躺平」sensibilities of the Chinese youth, which the subtitles have accurately translated into “lying still and doing nothing.” He has made a film of a descent into night like the aforementioned Y tu mamá también and Lost in Translation, and though the journey can get quite unnecessarily stretched out and long, the thematic purpose crystallizes when the characters reach this moment of lying down. It is a scene that makes the entire film worthwhile, though in comparison, the subthemes of Nana’s dashed Olympic dreams and Haofeng’s mental illness are scattershot to the point of my apathy.
Under the guidance of Chen, Zhou and Yu turn in much more refined and dialed-down work compared to the abusively melodramatic Better Days, though Zhou still cries a few too many times (it’s almost like every director only sees Zhou’s superhuman single-tear ability and writes every scene of their film around that). Qu is satisfyingly sexy as the skinhead and Liu plays mental illness without going overboard, realistically capturing the difficult, complicated realities of depression. Most impressive of all is Chen making such thorough use of Yanji’s locations, as if he’s been living in Yanji his whole life, when in reality he’d never even been to Northeastern China before this film. The Breaking Ice can at times feel like a Yanji tourism ad—it almost uses too many picturesque locations—but it pays off in a transcendent third-act reveal, reaching the haunting qualities nature provides in Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria and, in a stroke of genius by Chen, music provides in Mulholland Drive.
The Breaking Ice is for sure messy, sometimes incoherent with its subthemes, sometimes overindulgent with its main narrative. But messiness isn’t a crime, as long as Chen delivers ample feeling within the messiness. He works cleverly within the confines of censorship to capture the ennui of China’s youth, intersecting that with burgeoning romantic tension, but alas the latter cannot blossom to its full potential.