There Will Be Snow

There Will Be Snow is set in Glaceterre, a city without Fireworks. The latter is actually an artificial intelligence system designed to make things easier for everyone, but it’s a line that sums up perfectly what the film itself is like. Watching Story Chen’s first feature is akin to staring at an exquisite snow globe in a glass cabinet: one can marvel at the exceptional craft on display, but it lacks the spark that could engage the viewer into empathising with the endless yearning and longing in the glacially-paced screenplay.

Boasting an attractive cast and enchanting imagery of tastefully designed post-industrial badlands, There Will Be Snow looks elegant but feels strangely void of elegy. Still, the NYU-educated Chen has delivered something that does look strikingly different from that of her Chinese peers – a quality that might propel her film to a sustained run on the festival circuit after its premiere at Busan’s Vision Asia section.

Set in an imaginary future of a fictional country, There Will Be Snow mostly unfolds in a bleak city plagued by food shortages, frequent blackouts and frustratingly long (and fist-flinging) queues – all consequences of its disconnection from a national online network that could allow users to gain access to work and play with ease. Living in a second-tier city in every sense of the word, residents dream of the chance to move over the perennially frozen river and into the Bright Zone, an upper-class area where people are reportedly happier and healthier with their affluent, automated lives.

So far, so Orwellian. Dystopian its setting might be, Chen’s film is just not that kind of story. Rather, There Will Be Snow revolves around the smaller and more intimate dilemmas faced by Gu Chen (Zhao Tian’ai), a dancer offered the opportunity to start a new job and a new life in the Bright Zone. Her initial excitement at leaving Glaceterre is somehow dampened by the appearance of Xu Chu (Chen Xiao), a Fireworks system engineer who has taken a break from his comfortable uptown life to search for the traces of his youth. Thus begins a long and meandering trawl through dilapidated neighbourhoods, sooty factories and floating ice, as the pair reminisce about their own good old days and those of their forgotten nomadic ancestors.

With Chen Gu’s own occasional remembrances of her bloodline and background – she claims to hail from the endangered Evenki ethnic minority (with a current population of around 35,000 in real-life China), and speaks of the disappearance of the tenements where her grandparents used to live – There Will Be Snow could be readily interpreted as an allegory for the drastic changes imposed on those living on China’s geographical and social margins during the country’s onward and upward march towards prosperity and prominence.

With these themes vanishing as quickly as they appear, it’s perhaps beyond the point (or pale) to over-interpret Chen’s film too much. Maybe it’s best to just be enchanted by Hu Mingjue’s flowing depiction of Wang Yi’s opulent production design, a partnership that makes There Will Be Snow appear so out of its time.

Director, screenwriter: Story Chen
Producer: Li Xiaoyu
Cast: Zhao Tian’ai, Chen Xiao, Wu Junting, Bai Sha, Shi Ailing
Cinematography: Hu Mingjue
Editing: Liu Xinzhu, Du Junlin
Production design: Wang Yi
Music: Oliver Cussac
Sound: Zhang Yancheng
Production companies: T. H. Entertainment
Venue: Busan International Film Festival (Vision Asia)
In Putonghua
90 minutes