Like her quick La Bouche De Jean-Pierre (1996) and her options Innocence (2004), Evolution (2015) and Earwig (2021), Lucile Hadžihalilović’s newest, The Ice Tower, gives an unnerving, surreal tackle a younger particular person’s coming of age. It begins with a feminine voiceover narrating a part of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’, accompanied by a fragmented kaleidoscope of snow-globe photographs (icy mountains, a tower) as if filtered by way of the distorting prisms of a crystal.
Jeanne (Clara Pacini) not solely is aware of ‘The Snow Queen’ by coronary heart, she additionally lives in a wintry, Alpine village whose snow white sierra resembles the illustrations from the e-book, which she commonly reads to her a lot youthful foster sister, Rose. Not as previous as she claims to be, however craving precociously to get out into the grownup world, Jeanne runs away from the heat and luxury of her foster residence on a quest for mom love. What the truth is she is going to discover is her personal sexual objectification, in addition to a mannequin of icy resilience and power in Cristina van den Berg (Marion Cotillard), a middle-aged actor who’s now enjoying the Snow Queen in a movie manufacturing on the studio constructing the place Jeanne has sought refuge from the weather.
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From the second Jeanne first sees Cristina, resplendent and imperious in her glowing costume, she is enchanted by this unusual, lovely lady who insists on at all times getting her approach, and has the director, Dino (Gaspar Noé), forged and crew petrified of her diva-like behaviour. Cristina has additionally seen Jeanne and is fast to take the younger woman beneath her wing – though what precisely she desires from Jeanne will not be at first clear in a situation the place each are performing a function and each are impostors.
What is obvious is that Cristina was herself as soon as a foster baby, and for her, the chilling injury has lengthy since settled into permafrost, in order that she is trapped in her personal cycles and addictions, and readily corrupts these round her. So whether or not Cristina gives an exemplary fable or a cautionary story, she embodies a doable future for Jeanne (and Rose), except – like Gerda in ‘The Snow Queen’ – they will escape the icy grip of future.
Right here a longtime fairy story is mixed with a fantasy movie (and its behind-the-scenes manoeuvrings), and with the anxious, aching dream lifetime of an adolescent, with the outcome that Andersen is fostered in the identical family as David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), and even Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Gentle (1932). For that is, from starting to finish, a Bergfilm, a lot as Cristina’s surname is van den Berg, which, with its spurious intimations of the Aristocracy, could also be as pseudonymous as Jeanne’s personal adopted id, ‘Bianca’ (bringing her near Snow White).
The Ice Tower is as fragile and delicate as a snowflake, as disorientating and mysterious as adolescence, and as darkish as a winter’s night time. For it’s a shadowy frío-noir, full with femme fatale, at the same time as its elusive, edgy narrative is handed down, like memento beads or diffracting crystals, from era to era.
