Chinese-Singaporean filmmaker Anthony Chen lets us in on his favorite films from film school with “The Breaking Ice,” a Chinese love triangle redolent in images, themes and situations of The French New Wave.

There are references to Truffaut’s “Jules et Jim” and Goddard’s “Bande à part” in this story of lost souls that find each other in a wintry corner of China with a unique place in Chinese life.

Korean culture, cinema and TV interest enough Chinese that there are tourists who flock to Yanji on the North Korean border, a Chinese-established prefecture for Koreans who have immigrated there. It was meant to be as Korean as China would allow.

Haofeng (Haoran Liu) is a sad introvert who has come there for a Korean wedding.

Nana (Dongyu Zhou) is a tour guide, leading the curious travelers around “traditional” Korean village recreations, into Korean restaurants and shops, all with an idea of introducing them to a (past) Korean culture that existed before Korea was divided, and without the necessity of isolationist North Korea opening its borders to tourism from its fellow authoritarian state.

And Han Xiao (Chuxiao Qu) is a cook at one of those Korean eateries. He’s sweet on the petite pixie Nana, but she’s a brittle soul, seemingly-resigned to this grueling work of standing and walking and grinning to strangers.

“Whether I like it or not, I have to do it” is how she sums that up, in Mandarin with English subtitles. She lightly mocks Xiao for his affection and puts him down to Haofeng by insulting his “mediocre” cooking.

Everybody has a secret or not so secret desire. Everyone is wallowing in quiet desperation. They are, in a way, as trapped as a local fugitive (Ruguang Wei), whose “wanted” poster is everywhere, thanks to a series of snatch-and-run thefts.

Haofeng loses his phone, the one he’s been mumbling “Wrong number” into every time his mental health clinic calls to try and reschedule his missed appointment. Haofeng tells strangers at the wedding and his two new acquaintances that he’s in “finance” and from “Shanghai.” The always-calling clinic is in Pujiang, a long way from Shanghai.

The three are brought together because she takes pity on the tourist with the lost phone (no access to money or the world without that) and introduces “handsome” but “always frowning” Haofeng to her not-quite-suitor Xiao. But they’re really drawn together the way lost souls always find their own in the movies, especially those from the French New Wave.

They chat and drink, sing karaoke and pub-crawl. But there’s something about the forlourn way she looks at skaters on a local lake, something in the way the cook describes never having “been anywhere,” and something in Haofeng’s despairing, clumsy courtship of Nana that suggests a world of hurt in which any one of the three could jump off a roof or cliff, wander off into the snow or drive into oncoming traffic.

Chen (“Wet Season” was his previous film) has made a movie of familiar themes and recognizable antecedents. But he offsets that by dropping us into an alien world so disorienting that little here neatly fits into a narrative box.

The characters can wander up to the Yalu River and shout across it at North Korea. They can pass checkpoints to go see a legendary lake in the bordering Changbai Mountains, a trio emotionally out of their depth soon literally out of their snow depth. And they can dare each other to see who can “steal the biggest book” from a bookstore they impulsively visit, “wanted” posters in a surveillance state be damned.

Chen adapts his characters from their New Wave or wherever origins to this world and lets the viewer peel away their mysteries, but he doesn’t give us pat answers about how they will face their respective fates.

“The Breaking Ice” thus becomes an obscure parable about belonging and connecting in a crowded, impersonal world, connections that are necessary for our well-being and are all the more difficult to make when we’re all uprooted from our past and rendered remote from human interaction right up to that moment we lose our all-important/all-demanding cell phones.

Rating: unrated, sex, some nudity

Cast: Dongyu Zhou, Haoran Liu and Chuxiao Qu

Credits: Scripted and directed by Anthony Chen. A Strand release.

Running time: 1:40