A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

The Breaking Ice (Anthony Chen, 2023)

Chiuxio Qu, Haoran Liu, and Dongyu Zhou in The Breaking Ice

Cast: Dongyu Zhou, Haoran Liu, Chiuxio Qu, Ruguang Wei, Baisha Liu. Screenplay: Anthony Chen. Cinematography: Jing-Pin Yu. Production design: Luxi Du. Film editing: Hoping Chen, Mun Thye Soo. Music: Kin Leonn. 

Anthony Chen's The Breaking Ice is a post-pandemic fable centered on three members of Generation Z, the cohort that perhaps suffered the greatest cultural dislocation when Covid emerged: At a time when they should have been exploring life's options, setting out on careers, discovering themselves, they were severely restricted. The film also features a relationship that has been oddly prevalent in movies recently, the two-guys-and-a-girl triangle popularized by French New Wave directors in films like François Truffaunt's Jules and Jim (1962) and Jean-Luc Godard's Bande à Part (1964). (It was also central to this year's film by Luca Guadagnino, Challengers.) The "girl" in this case is Nana (Dongyu Zhou), who works as a tour guide, a job she certainly doesn't want to turn into a career. Leading a group of tourists, she meets Haofeng (Haoran Liu), who works in finance in Shanghai and has come north for a friend's wedding. He takes the tour to fill time before his flight leaves, but being much younger than the rest of the tour group, he strikes up a conversation with Nana. When they return to the hotel, they continue to see each other, and eventually she introduces him to Xiao (Chiuxio Qu), who has come north to work for his aunt in a restaurant, a job he also doesn't intend to keep. The rest of the film is about the discoveries the somewhat misfit trio make about each other and themselves. Chen is a little too heavy-handed in creating epiphanic moments for his protagonists and with the trope announced in his title, from an opening sequence showing ice being cut into blocks to a scene near the end of the film in which the three protagonists pass an ice cube from mouth to mouth. Still, it's a film with engaging performances and the beautiful scenery of an unfamiliar setting: northeastern China right at the border with North Korea.

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