I loved Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo but I haven’t had cause to watch his later films. Here we have him directing a very Chinese film with crisp visuals that evoke works such as Black Coal, Thin Ice. Yet this is no noir, it is instead a drama about the angst and aimlessness of Chinese youth, with a dose of confused romance. In theory, this is a thematically rich film with a lot going on. Unfortunately it never gelled together into a coherent whole for me. Reading up on it, it seems like Chen threw the script together in a matter of days while he was under quarantine in China during the COVID-19 pandemic. Combined with the objective of making a freer, looser film, this does indeed seem to be the inevitable result.

Haofeng, a young man who works for a finance company in Shanghai, arrives in the cold border city of Yanji to attend a friend’s wedding. He is visibly rich and successful but seemingly suffers from depression as he avoids phone calls about missing a psychiatric appointment. Afterwards, he impulsively joins a tour group to visit the local attractions. The tour is led by Nana, a former figure skater who is just doing the job for the money. She takes the tour for lunch at a restaurant owned by the family of a friend, Xiao, and notices that Haofeng is travelling alone. When Haofeng loses his phone, Nana takes pity on him and takes him out on a night partying in town with Xiao. The next day he wakes up too late to catch his flight back to Shanghai and the two persuade him to stay for a few days longer. They spend times together as a somewhat awkward trio. Xiao is romantically interested in Nana but she seems to want only a casual relationship and sleeps with Haofeng. All three seem to be running away from something, yet each suffers alone without really opening up to one another.

The visuals are striking and Yanji makes for a fascinating setting for a Chinese film with its strong Korean cultural influence. All three of the main characters are intriguing and we can discern echoes of issues relevant to current issues in Chinese society in each of them. Yet while individual elements are fine, I struggled to make sense of how everything fits together. There are even red herrings that don’t lead to anything significant. For example, throughout the film, there are posters about a reward offered for a wanted fugitive. We’d expect that this fugitive is somehow connected to one of the main characters but it seems to be used only as an object lesson about them being too apathetic to act decisively. Similarly one scene involves the three travelling to Heaven Lake and having an experience that seems inspired by a story that Haofeng recounts with no obvious meaning to it. I’d argue that Chen needed to pin down the characters more concretely. Haofeng is such a mysterious figure that I even doubted that he’s actually a rich financier from Shanghai as he claimed. All three characters have nothing to do with the local culture Yanji so that’s another missed opportunity.

The film is at its best when it clearly references contemporary trends in Chinese society such as the lying flat movement questioning the point of striving hard only to get nowhere. But it shies away from making any serious attempt to grapple with the issue and the positive bias it shows towards the end explains why it got past the censors. If it had dared to embrace a three-way relationship between the characters that it keeps hinting towards, it would also be bolder and more interesting but again, it falls short. In the end, this film seems to be exactly what it looks like on the surface, a mishmash of ideas that Chen threw together in a hurry and even the location of Yanji was picked out by looking at a map of China and thinking of a cool place to set the story. Its structure is just too loose and there’s no real depth in it.

Chen himself recounts that he made this in response to questions that his previous films have been so precise and tightly controlled. It’s a credit to his abilities that this still turned out as decently as it did, but I much prefer a film that is well planned and fully thought out from the beginning to the end, instead of something spontaneous and deliberately messy.