TW: suicidal ideation
The Breaking Ice (2023)
Written and directed by Anthony Chen
A little bit of “Y tu mamá también,” a little bit of “Los delincuentes,” this Singaporean production set in a provincial Chinese city features a love triangle between a tourist from Shanghai and a couple who work in hospitality. The tourist, a depressed man, in his late twenties maybe, Li Haofeng (Haoran Liu), is on an aimless trip to this distant city, Yanji,1 near the North Korean border. He’s clearly seeking an escape, for reasons that are never clarified; he is tormented by suicidal ideation.
Nana (Dongyu Chen) and Han Xiao (Chuxiao Qu) are a few years younger. She’s a tour guide, his aunt runs a restaurant where the tour bus faithfully stops. (The food they serve the tourists is mediocre, if plentiful; when Han Xiao cooks for just the three of them, it’s much better.) Both are separated from their past: Han Xiao from his home, Nana from a life as an elite figure skater.
When Li Haofeng, a tour bus customer, misses his return flight, they invite him to stay, to show him around the unpromising, wintry city. Sure enough, there is plenty to see, it seems, none of it on the standard tour: discotheques, a night market, the zoo after closing hours. They come into Nana’s apartment after a drunken night out, and Han Xiao remarks, “You’ve never invited me here when it’s the two of us!” so it seems they aren’t quite boyfriend-girlfriend; in any case, she quickly sleeps with the visitor.
Han Xiao takes this philosophically, content to remain friends, and the trio continues sightseeing. They top off their days together with a trip to a landmark on the North Korean border, Heaven Lake. It takes a whole day to drive to a place of lodging, and hours to hike up the mountain to see the lake,2 which like Crater Lake in the U.S., fills a volcanic caldera. They have to hike through heavy snow, and they never even reach the lake; they have to turn back to escape a coming blizzard. It’s at this point that a chance encounter with a mountain resident changes them all.
That’s pretty much the whole story, but a film like this doesn’t depend on its subtle plot movements. Like “Los delinquentes,” the movie is more interested in the characters and the ways that their lives are knocked off-kilter by their time together. Meanwhile the film does its best to make the provincial city of Yanji and its surroundings attractive. I lived for a couple of years in a place a little like this in Japan, and I can testify that even a remote, small, frozen city seems exotic to a visitor in his 20s, and bearable for the 20-somethings that live there, who are mostly concerned with establishing adult lives and relationships. Meanwhile, for western viewers, the film serves as an interesting travelogue. (A helpful map is below.)
But as a western viewer, I was conscious — as I usually am when I see a foreign film about people and places I know almost nothing about — of all that happens in the film without me noticing: the accents, the customs, the unspoken educational levels and economic possibilities of the people from these locales and social classes. When the two younger people look at the visitor from the big city, they see things I can’t.
That said, I was mystified by the importance the director — the talented Anthony Chen — seems to put on the act of smoking cigarettes. When the two men share a smoke late in the firm, the scene seems weighted, but I don’t really understand why, or why the director couldn’t have used another act to show whatever he’s trying to show with the scene.
The film was Singapore’s official entry in 2023 festivals and competitions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanji
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/culture/2021/07/135_49389.html