Singaporean film-maker Anthony Chen brings warmth, sympathy and directness to this intimate drama set in Yanji on China’s border with North Korea. Three young people – two men and a woman – make a connection; each are looking for a way of breaking free from the emotional deep-freeze they’ve landed themselves in, just as the whole world wants to thaw itself out of the vast stagnancy created by the Covid pandemic.
At its best, this movie has the easy and seductively unencumbered swing of the French New Wave, with something of Godard’s Bande à Part. That film was surely on Chen’s mind when he created a scene in which his three characters have a crazy dare about who can steal the biggest book from the bookstore that they’re listlessly drifting through; a wild, giggling dash leading to a chaotic and humiliating denouement. But some plot points and characterisations are left unresolved or anticlimactically closed down; there’s some jeopardy about a North Korean criminal at large which is bafflingly dispensed with. The narrative meltwater makes things a bit soggy, and there is a frankly peculiar flourish of CGI in the woodland wilderness of the Changbai mountains that didn’t really get us anywhere, and jarred with the low-key realist immediacy of everything else. All three performances, however, are tremendous.
