The Breaking Ice

2023 [CHINESE]

Action / Drama / Romance

7
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 91% · 35 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 85%
IMDb Rating 6.5/10 10 1404 1.4K

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Plot summary

In cold wintry Yanji, a city on China's northern border, young urbanite Haofeng, visiting from Shanghai, feels lost and adrift. By chance, he goes on a tour led by Nana, a charming tour guide who instantly fascinates him. She introduces him to Xiao, a personable but frustrated restaurant worker. The three bond quickly over a drunken weekend. Confronting their individual traumas, their frozen desires slowly thaw as they seek to liberate themselves from an icy world.

Director

Top cast

Dongyu Zhou as Nana
Haoran Liu as Li Haofeng
Chuxiao Qu as Han Xiao
Ruguang Wei as Fugitive
720p.BLU 1080p.BLU 720p.WEB 1080p.WEB 1080p.WEB.x265
918.41 MB
1280*640
Chinese 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 39 min
Seeds 3
1.84 GB
1920*960
Chinese 5.1
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 39 min
Seeds 3
920.18 MB
1280*640
Chinese 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 40 min
Seeds ...
1.85 GB
1920*960
Chinese 5.1
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 40 min
Seeds 6
1.67 GB
1920*960
Chinese 5.1
NR
Subtitles us  
24 fps
1 hr 40 min
Seeds 3

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by fridid 10 / 10

Please watch this if you were once searching for answers

Reviewed by gbill-74877 8 / 10

Lovely film

"Susan has a pair of god-gifted dancing shoes They can take her away from this weary world Like the smoke of a cigaretteIt was a cloudy night When she kissed me and floated into the heavens Honey, goodbyeWhat a night What a beautiful night So beautiful How it makes me weep"A connection of three young people in a remote area of China, each dealing with a deep sense of melancholy, each frozen to some extent by life, each wandering a maze wondering which way to turn. The affluent guy from Shanghai is disillusioned with the world and avoiding his mental health provider, the tour guide has had her dreams of being a figure skater broken and is estranged from her family, and the local cook who was never much good in school is dealing with unrequited love and wondering if this is all there is to life. You could say it's a trifecta of loneliness and depression. While the film quietly hit me in the gut (hell, you could say quietly pummeled me), somehow it didn't feel leaden, maybe because the characters are buoyed by being with one another. The snowy, rugged landscape around Yanji, near the border with North Korea, fit the tone perfectly. Just a lovely film, acknowledging the tough times in life, but somehow finding ways to move forward, thus feeling guardedly optimistic.
Reviewed by brentsbulletinboard 4 / 10

Left Me Cold

No matter how hard a film tries to convey a profound message through imagery and symbolism, if it doesn't have a cohesive narrative underlying that undertaking, it's not likely to succeed. Such is the case with this latest offering from writer-director Anthony Chen, who tells the story of three diverse but disconnected twenty-somethings (Dongyu Zhou, Haoran Liu, Chuxiao Qu) seeking to find their way in life in the northern Chinese city of Yanji, not far from the North Korean border. Set in the dead of winter, this unlikely trio comes together through impromptu (and, in all honesty, seemingly improbable) circumstances, quickly and inexplicably becoming bound by a suspect sense of chemistry. After coming together, they subsequently embark on a carefree weekend of dining, drinking, dancing and wrestling with sexual tension, intermixed with bouts of largely unexplained tear-laden ennui. The film consequently relies on implication and nuance to carry it forward, but the subtlety here is so subdued much of the time that it's challenging to figure out exactly what the director is striving for. By contrast, in other cases, the picture's patently obvious imagery is more than a little heavy-handed, as seen, for example, in its pervasive footage of the frozen winter landscape, a reflection of its "coldness of the world" theme. But what does it all add up to? That's hard to say. The result is a release that relies more on mood than substance, with much of it implausible, inconsequential, somewhat unfathomable and not especially engaging. To its credit, "The Breaking Ice" is gorgeously filmed, providing viewers with a look at an unfamiliar locale, backed by an atmospheric original score and carried forward by a trinity of capable performances. However, I came away from this feature largely unmoved and notably disinterested, the whole affair having left me cold (pun intended). To me, films that continually reach but never grasp just aren't worth the time - or the praise that they're undeservedly lavished with - and this is clearly one of them.

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