At the start of Stanley Kwan’s masterly 2001 melodrama, entrepreneur Chen Handong (Hu Jun) thinks back to the 1980s and to the night he met young architecture student Lan Yu (Liu Ye), freshly arrived in Beijing from the country and ripe for mentoring and more. The older man warns his toy boy not to get attached. “When two people know each other too well, it’s time to separate,” he says – then signally fails to heed his own advice. He showers Lan Yu with gifts, even buying him a villa,…
Tag: Romance films
The Breaking Ice review – frozen emotion and sexual tension on North Korean border
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…