Presented in the Un Certain Regard selection, Anthony Chen’s film offers a human and benevolent parenthesis in a 2023 Cannes Film Festival marked by harshness and darkness. A parenthesis that is sometimes tinged with melancholy.
Between a vomit sequence and an oppressive film by Jonathan Glazer, it’s good to take a break from humanity. And in this little game, A Winter in Yanji gets away with the congratulations of the jury.
Born in Cannes
Anthony Chen is a child of Cannes. Rewarded for his first short film (2007), then Camera d’or for his first feature, the Singaporean filmmaker, now 39, owes everything to the Croisette. And the Festival honors him this year with the Un Certain Regard selection.
Predictions foiled
Un hiver à Yanji features a trio (we dare not say a trouple), which has everything to turn into drama. Consider a Chinese financial expert passing through South Korea on an organized trip who meets a young woman, a tourist guide for the said organized trip. She is as talkative and willful as he is introverted and plagued by existential malaise. The pretty guide soon falls under the charm of the dark handsome man, and she introduces him most naturally to her best friend (and just a friend), who, a cook by trade, is dying of love for the young woman. She knows it and plays it, moderately. Thwarting all our predictions, the two men become friends, and the trio decides to take a weekend trip to winter Korea. If this roadtrip yields to some conventions of the genre (including the alcoholic marrade), it surprises by its sweetness and its deaf melancholy.
Response to COVID
The suspended time of this improvised stay is conducive to introspection for these three characters, who in turn reveal gaping flaws and hitherto unexpressed desires for elsewhere. And yet, they are indeed there, these desires. These characters are not yet thirty years old, but each is already probing the abyss between their dream life and their daily lives. The tears then arise, without warning, without effusion. This restraint is emotional and makes all the price of this beautiful film, which Anthony Chen wanted as a response to the forced confinement in times of COVID. The trio’s need for oxygen is above all his, and becomes ours.
A winter in Yanji does not yet have a release date in France.