“Black Coal, Thin Ice,” is a Chinese thriller, which won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlin International Film Festival in February for director Diao Yinan, while star Liao Fan took the best actor award.
Black Coal, Thin Ice: The Healing of an Impotent Man
By Jane Liu
How do we describe the story of Black Coal, Thin Ice? A crime thriller mixed with a little twisted romance — might be a good way to put it. However, I prefer calling it the healing process of an impotent man.
According to Sigmund Freud, libido, a person’s sex drive or desire for sexual activity, is an instinctive energy or force, contained in what Freud called the id, the strictly unconscious structure of the psyche. In this case, the movie is driven by libido. This movie follows the classic three-act structure and the first act tells the initiation of the hero’s impotency. The story begins with the hero, Zhang Zili, having sex with a woman, who we soon learn is his ex-wife, whom he tries to force himself on later but gets rejected and slapped in the face. The next upsurge comes when Zhang shoots two suspects to death in a hair salon while investigating a murder case, which results in his transfer out of the police station and loss of his gun. Guns have long been seen as the extension of male genitals. Combining the previous scenes, the plot implies that Zhang becomes impotent after releasing his last sexual impulsion.
In the second act, Zhang’s life becomes disoriented after losing his gun. He is stuck in a coal mine working as a guard and the closest he gets with sex is flirting with a very rude, man-like female coal miner. This portrays Zhang’s depression and anxiety from being unable to fulfill his libido. And then he encounters Wu Zhizhen — and the serial murders which precede her, which becomes his cure. The impotency is more evident with the Character Rong Rong, the owner of the laundry Wu works in. Rong pays prostitutes only to change skirts in front of him, and he harasses Wu, which clearly demonstrated that he is sexually dysfunctional. Zhang and Rong together reveal the status of impotency.
In the last act, Zhang forces Wu to confess her crime and they end up kissing on the roller coaster. Seeing them in the next scene having breakfast together with Wu putting on lipstick indicates they had coitus the previous evening. In the end, Zhang solves the case and gets back to the police. Getting his gun back symbolizes his impotency has been cured.
In a word, the movie cleverly tells a story of an impotent man driven by libido finally healing himself. It starts with the rejection of a woman, and ends with the reception of another.