The Breaking Ice (Ran Dong), the latest film from Singaporean writer-director Anthony Chen, is set in the city of Yanji, in northeastern China. The film’s protagonists are three outsiders all seemingly stuck in their lives, with their dreams and ambitions suspended as if frozen in place. Yanji’s sprawling, painterly landscapes blanketed in snow make their isolation starker, just as it makes their bonding more immediate, an urgent lifeline in the enveloping chill.
Nana (Zhou Dongyu) is a young woman who has relocated to Yanji to leave a traumatic event behind and works as a tour guide, ferrying Chinese visitors around town by bus to experience authentic Korean traditions. One of her tour stops is a restaurant where Xiao (Qu Chuxiao) works. Nana has a half-hearted, spiky relationship with the good-natured slacker. The third character, Haofeng (Liu Haoran), works in finance in Shanghai, and he is in Yanji for the wedding of a former classmate. Holding back in interactions with his old friends, he participates reluctantly in the festivities. He wears the obvious signs of depression and is possibly suicidal, a suggestion furthered by the calls he keeps evading from a mental health counseling center.
When Haofeng takes the bus tour, he is drawn to Nana because of her ambivalence, and she lends him some cash when he loses his cellphone. Nana invites Haofeng along to dinner with her and Xiao, and at the end of a drunken evening, all three end up back at her apartment, a privilege her quasi-boyfriend has never before been granted. It’s a soulful hangout scene, where all three characters explore their solitude, and it culminates in Xiao picking up a guitar and singing a sweet, melancholy love song with an emotional nakedness seldom seen in Chinese-language films.
The Breaking Ice is not a conventional romantic triangle so much as an impressionistic Generation Z portrait of reflections on disappointment and stasis, likely to resonate widely with young audiences, irrespective of their cultural backgrounds.
Throughout The Breaking Ice, Chen observes the subtle shifts in the dynamic between the three of them during this period. Haofeng takes tentative steps out of his shell and sleeps with Nana, who shares her broken dream with him. Xiao is aware of what’s happening but maintains his place in the triangle, swallowing whatever hurt he feels. Nor does sex change much between Nana and Haofeng.
There are poignant scenes that don’t propel the narrative but deepen our acquaintance with the characters as individuals and as a collective unit formed more by accident than design. They stroll along the North Korean border fence, visit a zoo, attempt to shoplift in a bookstore, get lost in the tall corridors of an ice maze, and more.
The gentle rhythms of Hoping Chen and Soo Mun Thye’s editing and the shimmering strands of Singaporean musician Kin Leonn’s score make these loose, free-flowing episodes highly pleasurable. Al the while, they subtly point out that none of the three friends belongs in Yanji, which can feel like a strange and in many ways foreign place.
In the beautiful closing act of The Breaking Ice, they take a trip up the Changbai Mountains, aiming to see Heaven Lake, a breathtaking body of water in a volcanic crater that straddles the border between China and North Korea. Chen sets the scene for catharsis, with worsening weather conditions affecting their trek. But instead, the film takes a graceful swerve into folklore, art, and even a hint of magic realism that profoundly touches all three of them.
Rich in feeling yet never emotionally emphatic, The Breaking Ice has an uncluttered narrative simplicity that’s mirrored in the shooting style and nicely offset by the nuanced complexity of the relationships. The closing notes of hope and renewal are lovely.
The Breaking Ice is a satisfying minor-key character study that beautifully explores the themes of stasis, isolation, and the bonding of outsiders. The film’s quiet observations and gorgeous cinematography form a cohesive whole that leaves an indelible impression on the audience.
