The Breaking Ice finds the warmth in young adults’ shared isolation
Melissa Lee Suppiah
THE winter of Covid-19 is easing, and Anthony Chen is thawing out.
The home-grown auteur made waves 10 years ago with his debut feature film Ilo Ilo, the first and only Singaporean film to win an award at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. After a slew of shorts and a sophomore feature release, Chen has been largely silent throughout the pandemic – but he’s back this year with not one, but two films.
The first, Drift – also his first English-language feature – debuted earlier this year to a warm reception at the Sundance Film Festival in the US. The second premiered at Cannes in May to rave reviews, and it’s easy to see why.
In The Breaking Ice, Chen takes us to Yanji – a small town in northern China a stone’s throw from the North Korean border. A young woman named Nana (Zhou Dongyu) spends her days leading tour groups with mechanical enthusiasm, competent at her routine job but harbouring no love for it.
When depressive urbanite Haofeng (Liu Haoran) loses his phone at one of her tour stops, she takes pity on him and invites him to dinner with her friend Xiao (Qu Chuxiao), a rough-edged local who carries a torch for her despite her mockery. After an alcohol-soaked night in which all three forge an unexpected connection, the trio embark on a few days of exploring Yanji together.
The Breaking Ice isn’t a “pandemic movie”, exactly – that is, the film doesn’t explicitly address it – but it certainly feels like one in every regard. Much of that is down to its core theme of loneliness and isolation, borne out in the film’s backdrop of deep winter.
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Chen is, without question, at his peak here. He lets the wintry setting speak for him, dwelling on images of buildings and mountains blanketed in snow – the growth of nature and industry alike quelled by the unrelenting frost.
Seasonal imagery aside, Yanji proves an effectual narrative stage for Chen to portray the perpetual displacement of today’s young adults. The town’s straddling of Chinese and Korean cultures parallels the in-between-ness this generation was brought up in – a blending of different customs and languages that can make one feel more enriched in some ways and discomfortingly untethered in others.
For such an emotionally complex work, Chen seems little preoccupied with sticking to his own script, which he wrote while in quarantine in a China hotel room. The film is sparing with its dialogue, relying on its capable leads to convey multitudes with just their expressions and body language.
Some of the highest points of the film are composed largely of shots of Nana, Haofeng and Xiao standing shoulder to shoulder, slumping around a coffee table, or squeezing together like little kids so they all fit on Xiao’s motorbike.
Chen hones in on these seemingly insignificant parts of human interaction and intimacy, and elevates them into something heart-achingly beautiful, lovingly buoyed by Kin Leonn’s delicate compositions. (For a live taste of this, drop by The Projector on Friday, Sep 8, to catch an ambient-beats set by Leonn at 8.30 pm.)
The best parts of the film are those that invite viewers to ponder: What’s the difference between being lonely and being alone? What makes life worth living? And – most soberingly – for a generation that’s spent so much of their adulthood feeling alone and lost in the world, is it ever too late to take the reins of your own life?
Some of the metaphors deployed by Chen can be heavy-handed or clunky – but his three leads carry the experience with deceptive ease, anchored by a particularly stunning turn from Zhou.
Against the immutable frost, their chemistry glows with a warmth that’s almost tangible, even as their breaths testify just how frightfully cold they are (temperatures on the set reached a low of -20 deg C, Zhou shares).
It’s always rare to witness a performance that doesn’t feel like acting. To have three at the same time in one project feels like a real gift, especially in a film as plaintive and tender as this.
The Breaking Ice is now showing in theatres
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