Review: A mesmerizing Marion Cotillard reigns over Lucile Hadžihalilovic's "The Ice Tower"

by Cláudio Alves

The Ice Tower starts in the fashion of a trance-like fairytale, pulling you in through visions of refracted light, a snow globe landscape deconstructed by optical illusion. In the background, music twinkles, practically glistens as if singing the song one imagines a bauble would if it had a voice. And speaking of voices, a mellifluous woman sounds off, narrating and enchanting, beckoning closer in tones that feel like freshly fallen snow on a flushed cheek. It's Marion Cotillard, yet unseen but already magnetic as the Snow Queen and the actress who breathes life into her, a double role in a backstage melodrama with a Freudian spin.

Lucile Hadžihalilovic, one of contemporary cinema's most underrated masters, reunites with Cotillard, 21 years after Innocence, for a film that's both a free adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's classic story and its echo...

Before the Oscar-winner appears on screen, twenty minutes in, much happens in The Ice Tower. Hadžihalilovic has no intention of disclosing her meta-textual intentions on a first impression, opening with Jeanne, an orphaned teen in 1970s France who still struggles with grief and the burden of guilt over her mother's death. Though she's found a new home with a foster family, the girl moves through life like an apparition, ghostly and half-lost somewhere other than here. Part of this alienation stems from her fascination with The Snow Queen fairytale, a childhood favorite to which she holds on like a last thread tethering her to the mother who's no longer here to offer solace, love, a warm embrace.

She wanders and the camera wanders with her, committing to a record of her drifting that's always on the verge of a dream. This is especially true when Hadžihalilovic finds Jeanne at the ice rink, contemplating other girls her age as they cut through the frozen surface, balanced on their blades, fae-like. And, as he did in the director's previous feature, Earwig, Jonathan Ricquebourg's cinematography sees these everyday visions and conjures an unreality that's two steps removed from a bad dream. The sights are familiar to those who've found themselves trapped in the oneiric prisons of sleep, yet also not. It's a uniquely cinematic experience, all about the quality of light and a diffuse sense of time.

Such a description would typically inspire an argument that, despite the prevalence of narrative within its mainstream form, cinema is an art whose essence transcends the necessity of storytelling. That is true of much of Hadžihalilovic's output, a filmography full of sensorial treasures, but The Ice Tower elides that purely experiential proposition. Jeanne's journey goes through an escape, stealing one of the ice skaters' identities before running away. At night, she breaks into a building she assumed was empty, only to discover herself in the middle of a strange scene. It happens at the juncture of consciousness and unconsciousness, when the girl's sleep is interrupted by a brightness.

From the featureless darkness, fake snow falls like powdered diamond, and a hand sheathed in supple leather reaches out. Suddenly, the shadows peel back from a streak of crystalline white, glowing like stars do in the night sky but manifested in the shape of a woman. She's clad in a costume dripping with glass gems, glitter lines of lungs' interiors and the skeletal structure beneath the flesh adorning its surface. Her hair is swooped in the style of a Marcel wave, her eyes covered in crushed silver, staring unseeing ahead. She is an icy echo of Delphine Seyrig in Daughters of Darkness. She is the Snow Queen of a mother's tales and the Snow Queen of a film within a film. 

Because Jeanne is in a movie set, spying the enigmatic Cristina as the crew tests her styling before the camera's gaze. The older woman will soon find the teen, now going by Bianca, sleeping in the shadows and will facilitate her hiring as an extra, then as an actress to replace another novice performer whom the star didn't find to her liking. Theirs is a bond that can sometimes border on sinister, defined by transactions and transgressions, as they each consume the other with eyes that can as often shine with the want of a maternal connection or a cannibal's hunger. If Cotillard channels Seyrig at her vampiric best, newcomer Clara Pacini is in tune with her inner Sandrine Bonnaire, evoking the human mysteries she embodied for Varda, Pialat, Rivette.

Their pas de deux is tentative, as if both danced next to an abyss calling them down into its depths, with Cotillard inspiring a terrified sort of awe that makes the audience outside the scene just as prone to obsession as Jeanne is inside it. The star's ambivalence in characterization and Hadžihalilovic's ambivalence in observing her frightens, implying that the Snow Queen narrative they're shooting is fundamentally the same as the drama unfolding backstage. Cristina wants Jeanne's adoration, she needs the effect of that idolatry when both are together on screen. Still, does she fear being overshadowed? Does she seek to replace the dead mother or devour her memory? Does she want to devour Jeanne, too? 

Perhaps more importantly, who even is Cristina? Hadžihalilovic is keen on playing with the idea of doubles, as when she frames the star's dressing room through Jeanne's POV and duplicates the woman. On the couch, Cotillard rests insouciantly, while, slightly obscured, a mannequin stands wearing her queenly costume, wig, and crown. In other instances, checking over dailies will see the confronting gazes of the Cristinas on both sides of the filmic device, observer and observed. And those are just the versions we grasp around the plateau, since other Cristinas exist in magazine spreads, adding slipperiness to this figure whom we struggle to grasp, hands closing around vapor.

Then again, all these unanswered questions come close to being the point of movie stars to begin with. In fact, as it goes on, The Ice Tower threatens to become a meditation on how some approach stories, in general, and the illusions of cinema, in particular, stars included. A study on how we project onto them, and pour ourselves into them, looking for answers that will not come since art won't save you. Neither will those beautiful people on screen, who you think you know but don't. Thus, the connective tissue between a devotee and their idol is seen as grief, as a rotting thing whose gangrenous decay will earn its pound of dead flesh if you leave it festering. 

With that in mind, it's fair to say that, while The Ice Tower feels notably narrative and character-driven in the context of Hadžihalilović's oeuvre, it still comes down to the same mesmeric rhythms, styles, and preoccupations of her other work. Crucially, it also returns to their foremost principle – cinema as nightmare. Through Cristina's screen test-induced self-assessments and Jeanne's gradual erasure, it further muses on the medium as a warping force that can simultaneously produce divine beauty and its negation. This is no love letter to the seventh art, but a piece of fan mail whose every line drips with religious reverence and a hint of soul-shaking terror, a prayer to an evil god. How's that for a fairytale?

Lucile Hadžihalilovic's The Ice Tower is now in cinemas, enjoying a limited theatrical run, distributed by Yellow Veil Pictures.