Marion Cotillard stars in French director Lucile Hadžihalolović's fourth feature, a glacially paced adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”. Prepare to be entranced. And maybe a wee bit frustrated.
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Over the course of three films, from her 2004 debut Innocence to 2021's Earwig via Evolution, one of our favourite European films of the 21st century, Lucile Hadžihalolović has established herself as one of the most singular voices in French cinema.
For her transfixing fourth feature, she’s reuniting with Marion Cotillard after Innocence as well as her Earwig screenwriter Geoff Cox to loosely adapt Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”.
Like a lot of fairy tales, it begins with an unhappy orphan. Jeanne (Clara Pacini, in her first feature role) lives in a foster home in a small, mountainous village in 1970s France. She decides to flee and head to an ice rink she's seen on a postcard. There, she admires an elegant skater named Bianca and adopts her identity when the latter loses her purse.
With nowhere to sleep, she breaks into what seems to be an abandoned warehouse. It turns out she’s kipping in a film studio, where a production of The Snow Queen – one of her favourite tales - is being filmed. Famous (and feared) actress Cristina Van Der Berg (Marion Cotillard) is playing the central role and we learn through the chats between the extras that nothing escapes the “pitiless” diva.
True enough, Cristina quickly finds out that Jeanne, who has managed to pass herself off as an extra, has been sleeping at the studio. Or maybe she knew all along?
A mutual infatuation grows between them, and through a crystal yanked from a costume, the two “will be connected forever” in a manipulative push-and-pull.
Those familiar with Hadžihalolović’s work will know the director’s affinity for stories brimming with brooding atmospherics and which deal with young characters faced with maturity-triggering circumstances. In adapting “The Snow Queen”, she distils the tale of a young girl’s quest for her missing flame and who becomes influenced by an older woman to make it something more. More enigmatic; more menacing; more glacial.
Glacial is the optimum word, as the form mirrors the content. The pacing is measured - to say the least - in this world of minimal dialogue, full of recurring motifs whose slippery purposes can often make The Ice Tower feel more about vibes than a crescendoing narrative. Still, it’s a brooding and powerfully stylish world to get lost in, as the butterscotch lighting and shadowplay bolster the dark fairy tale mood, which is peppered with other references to childhood classics. Little Red Riding Hood’s red coat; the bracelet pearls hitting the ground like the breadcrumbs in Hansel And Gretel; the ogre figure Jeanne runs away from during her initial escape... These come together to honour the fairy tale form and to better tell the tale of heroine on the cusp of womanhood.
Central to this is Cotillard’s character. Initially, it seems that the award-winning French actress doesn’t get to do all that much apart from embrace a sense of noirish beauty and elusiveness. However, what she creates in the second half of The Ice Tower adds layers to Jeanne’s quest.
Cristina is a Norma Desmond figure, one who demands a vampiric sacrifice from a younger version of herself; but she is also a wounded soul. The girl in Earwig may have had actual teeth of ice, but Cristina has a jaded heart that threatens to become irreversibly icy. She’s an actress who considers her glory days to be behind her and who sees a coming-of-age occur right before her eyes. Jeanne as Bianca drops her dead mother’s beads as if progressively abandoning her birth mother and opening herself up to a maternal substitute; Cristina recognises this and strikes.
There's another interpretation though, one brought to light through Cotillard's performance. Cristina could be resigning herself to what she’s known all along: this adolescent awakening only casts her as a steppingstone.
To say that The Ice Tower’s layers are snowflake-levels of numerous is putting it mildly. The most fascinating one is the recurring amount of mise en abyme throughout – chiefly brought upon by the totemic presence of a mirror in Andersen’s tale.
Hadžihalolović replaces the fantasy staple by a camera, thereby creating a film within a film that offers up a meditation on how cameras, like mirrors, can reflect and deform reality. And when you witness the Cristina / Snow Queen and Jeanne / Bianca dédoublements, the film becomes the tale of an older woman both cruelly and resolvedly imparting the love of the multifacetted medium of cinema itself.
It sounds like a lot. And it is, especially if you’re not in the right mood for longueurs and prism-like layers. Viewers looking for more crystalized intent or even something overtly stranger may end up frustrated. And it’s true that even for fans of Evolution’s sinister grooming rituals and Earwig’s haunting surrealism, this eerie reverie does lack an impactful sense of strangeness – something initially teased by the ominous title card featuring what looks a lot like the American Horror Story font.
Still, anyone yearning to be entranced by a frosty mood piece crackling with meaning will find The Ice Tower’s intoxicating spell tricky to break.
La Tour de Glace (The Ice Tower) is out in French cinemas now. It comes out in the US on 3 October and heads to the BFI London Film Festival next month - before hitting UK theatres on 21 November.
