THE BREAKING ICE – Review by Jennifer Green
This lovely story of friendship and a search for identity and meaning is Singapore’s nominee to the International Feature Film Oscar. That is where director Anthony Chen is originally from, but he filmed The Breaking Ice (Ran Dong) in northern China near the Korean border. The borderland setting plays a metaphorical role for its three lead characters, young people all feeling adrift and unsatisfied in a city not their own. And the frigid temperatures of the snowy location adds to the film’s bluish mood, an iciness the trio only just start to melt before the movie ends.
Shanghai financier Haofeng (Haoran Liu), in wintry Yanji for a wedding, is clearly depressed. Chen succinctly sets this up with foreshadowing when Haofeng steps outside to take a call from a mental health clinic reminding him about a missed appointment. Finding himself at the top of a tall staircase at the back of the building, he kicks a bit of snow off the ledge and watches as it plummets several stories below.
There, tour guide Nana (Dongyu Zhou) is just seeing visitors off a bus with their luggage. We’d already had a bit of foreshadowing in Nana’s story as well – though she comes across as perky, her face falls and her body slumps every minute she’s not within view of the tourists she’s guiding. Her ankle seems to be bothering her, too. Next thing we know, Haofeng is on her bus and the two make a connection. When he loses his phone, it’s the perfect excuse to extend his break from what must be a bleak reality in Shanghai. Nana invites him out with her friend Xiao (Chuxiao Qu), who harbors not-so-secret feelings for Nana, and the three spend the next several days together.
Chen allows the trio’s relationship to develop naturally, with sparse dialogues that only slowly reveal character details, and in a natural way that feels both realistic and pleasurable. He captures meaningful glances between the three and infuses added emotion to scenes through music (by young Singaporean musician Kin Leonn) and often pregnant silences. His characters are surprisingly world-weary for twenty-somethings, which makes the glimpses of joy and lightness in the film especially welcome, and there are many of these.
But there’s also tension. Haofeng breaks down crying when nobody is looking. Nana is bored and has self-isolated, for reasons we only discover later in the film. Xiao has never really left home to explore the world or try to make it on his own. He seems restless and eager to live by the “Live Free” motto on his hoodie as he drives the threesome around town on his motorcycle.
They’re all searching for something, perhaps primed for something new. They break through each other’s outer shells on their weekend together – breaking the ice, as the title suggests – and the human warmth they give and receive could portend positive things for each to come. In Haofeng’s case, though, it’s not clear he will survive the journey, a reality that comes to a head on a meaningful trek to a legendary lake in the mountains.
Chen, who won the Caméra d’Or award at Cannes in 2013 with his debut feature Ilo Ilo, has said he wrote this film as “a love letter to the young people of China.” He suggests he was trying to capture “the spirit” of the young Chinese. It’s not totally clear what that spirit is, but the film is a sensitive and poignant glimpse into three young people’s lives in a particular place and moment in time.
