What is it with Lucile Hadzihalilovic and ice? In her last film, Earwig, her central character was a browbeaten little girl without teeth who had to submit to wearing ice dentures, suspended from a cruel metal frame, all day. Her new film turns up the freezing unit to 11 in a long riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, moving between the white peaks of the French Haute Savoie, an ice rink and a film set where a version of The Snow Queen is being filmed in what appears to be real snow. It certainly sounds real as Jeanne (Clara Pacini), the young girl Hadzihalilovic sends out into this endless cold, crunches it underfoot.
Like Andersen’s story, The Ice Tower centers on a girl on a quest, a framework that in the original can be read — as in many fairytales — as a mythologizing of the heroine’s growth into womanhood. Jeanne is 15, a restless adolescent among a tribe of younger children in an orphanage in the mountains where she is first seen wandering at dusk, her way lit by the snow’s reflective glitter. Everyone knows she is working up to running away.
Jeanne is a dreamer. Her first destination is the town’s ice rink, where she watches a beautiful skater called Bianca pirouette. By sheer accident, she comes by Bianca’s handbag in the street and adopts her identity. Meanwhile, trying to avoid becoming the prey of lupine men, she breaks into the cellar of a vast building which turns out to be a film studio. There, she discovers a costume for a Snow Queen, dripping with crystals; when she is found eating from the film crew’s craft table, she is given a job as an extra. Her last stroke of luck is to be adopted by the Snow Queen herself: Marion Cotillard, playing the most manipulative diva since Norma Desmond.
Straightforward as this sounds, the world of The Ice Tower is rendered so sinister by the amplified crackles and moans of its sound design, so distorted by spaces that turn from sets to reality and back again, and as something adjacent to so-called “slow cinema”, so filled with disturbing longueurs that it never feels like a real place or time. It has other antecedents: Alice’s Wonderland or the wintry Narnia behind the back of the wardrobe. Anything might happen here.
Jeanne sleeps in a corner of the studio, her dreams as vivid as her waking life. When she discovers a scale model of the ice tower, peers into its tiny windows and then finds herself inside it, she may well be inside a nightmare, but we can’t be sure. What is striking is that we do not see anything, real or not, from her point of view. She wanders the studio with her flashlight; instead of seeing what she sees, we just see that beam coming towards us. We watch what she does; we watch her watching beautiful Cristina, the star whose fame means she can do as she wants.
The film is set in the ’70s — at least, that’s how the cars and costumes check out — but perhaps only to reflect the director’s own adolescence. The film they are making seems to hail from a much earlier era, with the Queen’s scenes played out against painted backdrops. Cristina lounges about between scenes in velvet frocks and jackets, tended by a criminally obliging doctor, like a figure from Hollywood’s Babylonian era. Or, indeed, like the fictional Queen whose kiss will freeze your heart.
Hadzihalilovic worked closely as an editor and writer with French cinematic shock jock Gaspar Noe — who appears in this film, playing a director — before taking up the reins as a director in her 2004 film Innocence, which also starred the luminous Cotillard. Girls trying to learn to negotiate the world, repressive institutions in cavernous spaces and obscurely malevolent authority figures, all suffused in an atmosphere of menace, are her recurring motifs. Quite what purpose they serve, however, remains elusive.
The Ice Tower is full of brilliantly conceived and rendered pathways that end in cul-de-sacs; it is beguiling, but hardly satisfying. It is always a pleasure to watch Marion Cotillard piece together a character; she has an extraordinary ability to appear regally impassive and clearly be very troubled at the same time. It is a pleasure just to look at her. But it’s not enough.
Title: The Ice Tower
Festival: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
Sales Agent: Goodfellas
Director: Lucile Hadžihalilović
Screenwriter: Lucile Hadžihalilović and Geoff Cox
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl, Gaspar Noé and Marine Gesbert
Running time: 1 hr 58 min
