It’s not often that I feel compelled to start a film review talking about a specific piece of costuming, but there’s a dress in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s The Ice Tower that simply cannot go unmentioned. The costume for diva actress Cristina van den Berg (Marion Cotillard) in an experimental ‘70s French production of The Snow Queen, it’s a work of sartorial art around which pretty much the entirety of the rest of the film revolves, a dress that looks alive even when draped over a mere mannequin. It’s the highlight of the deeply eerie design philosophy that Hadzihalilovic builds all of The Ice Tower on, a story of obsession and dreaming and the dangers of believing life can be like a film.
Just as the characters within the film are adapting a fairytale, so too is The Ice Tower a fable, one that feels like it hits familiar beats to classic tropes of stories you would have heard in your own youth. There’s a runaway orphan, in this case lonely and confused teenager Jeanne (superb newcomer Clara Pacini), who leaves behind her quietly dull rural life to chase her dreams and join, in place of a circus, a film set, where she beguiles and is beguiled by Cristina, sparking a slow-burn two-way obsession.
As Jeanne (having changed her name to Bianca) gets more and more involved in the production, eventually even replacing the co-lead actress when she proves more able to handle the unruly crow that dominates a lot of scenes, so she and Cristina fall more under one another’s spell. In Cristina, Jeanne sees the true Snow Queen, an immortal monarch who can bestow mystic gifts, while Cristina imagines Jeanne/Bianca as part acolyte, part her own younger self – yet deep down, what each wants from the other is much more humiliatingly direct and human. Hadzihalilovic mixes these feelings into the fabric of the film itself, as dreams, fantasies, reality, and the movie all meld into one another.
It’s a hypnotic experience, set against almost constant darkness – the work of the filming means whenever the sun is up, the characters are inside – with an incredible soundtrack that sounds like the score for a Disney musical picked up a curse and made its way into a darker film than it intended. Elliptical and dreamlike as the material is, it’s additionally impressive how comfortable Pacini is in anchoring the slow madness, while Cotillard is transfixingly sinister, casting dark spells with her looks and probing questions.
Visually striking as it is, ‘beautiful’ might not be quite the right word for The Ice Tower, its layers of unreality presented starkly and in low light, but it’s not a film you can ever really grow tired of looking at. As all Hadzihalilovic films are, it can be a challenging, opaque, intellectual exercise, but I also found it deeply affecting, rumbles of desperation and uniquely feminine loneliness emerging constantly from the inky black nights in which The Ice Tower makes its home; as cold as its title suggests but just as grand too.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 