“A Winter in Yanji was born from a strong desire…”, writes Anthony Chen in the note of intent which opens the press kit for his film. “And for me, concludes the Singaporean filmmaker, [c’était] a love letter to young Chinese.”
Yanji is a Chinese city located near the northern border of North Korea. It’s cold. Young Haofen (Liu Haoran) has arrived there for a wedding. We see him sitting at one of the banquet tables, alone in the middle of this party which is overwhelming him, and while the wedding guests are all dancing, drunk on food, beer and tradition, he bites an ice cube. , staring into space. He wears thin metal-rimmed glasses and a teenage mustache that doesn’t make him look any better. His boredom and his youth compete with his beauty. He resists no matter how hard he resists, and while he was about to grab another ice cube to chew, Haofen is forcibly taken into the caterpillar which brings to the highest level the joy common to all the parents and friends of young people. married. We don’t feel that the director has fallen in love with his actor, as happens too often in cinema. If so, Chen puts some restraint into it, as if he was primarily concerned with making viewers fall in love with the star of his film. Haofen manages to free himself from the caterpillar, going out to get some fresh air on the terrace. Glued to the railing, he pushes the little packets of snow that he watches to burst to suicide.
The temptation is great, but not that much. He gets in. I no longer remember when or how Nana (Zhou Dongyu) appears, a fairly pretty, rather cheerful young girl who finds charm in Haofen’s dismay. I interpret it like that. A compassionate flirt. In any case, she speaks to him and it seems enormous that he responds to her, taken aback by the interest shown in him. He would rather continue to chew on ice cubes. She is a tourist guide. We will see her officiating inside a bus full of visitors who wonder what they find interesting in this city. The cold, perhaps. Nana talks to them about the landscape through the coach’s sound system, which is not particularly panoramic. It doesn’t feel like Nana and Haofen are falling in love; no doubt because of the strategy of the director who, by keeping them both at a distance, by emphasizing the furtiveness of the glances they give each other, the shyness of the remarks they exchange, does everything so that it’s us, the spectators, who fall in love with this couple who doesn’t dare to be.
Anthony Chen, the great filmmaker of border towns
And here is Xiao (Qu Chuxiao), the handsome guy, the trendy one, the one who has a motorcycle, a job, and he is Nana’s friend, boyfriend, lover, regular. So immediately things become complicated at the same time as they become trivialized. We even fear that they will become truffautized, juléjimized.
It is more complicated than that. Xiao and Haofen seem to get along well. Between the student from the capital (Shanghai) and the worker from the provinces (Yanji), they have something to talk about. In fact, the three of them are having a good evening. Nana invites them to her house. Xiao is surprised to find himself there, because in the six months he has been with Nana, he had never walked through the door of her apartment. She’s weird, this girl. She has a guitar hanging on the wall.
Xiao picks it up, plays, sings a melancholic song. We start hoping that things stay there, especially since the three of them aren’t sleeping together. It would ruin everything. At one point, briefly, Xiao looks at Haofen, over Nana’s shoulders. What they agree on, we don’t know.
I must warn you that there is no romantic intrigue in this Winter in Yanji. Don’t go there for that. But Anthony Chen has a way of creating an object of “very strong desire” that makes him quite clever. Perhaps the great filmmaker of border towns, those where everything is always on the verge of falling apart.
Christophe Donner is a writer
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