More than 20 years after their previous collaboration in Innocence, a film about the coming of age of a group of young girls in a shadowy institution run by frosty matriarchs, French director-actor duo Lucile Hadžihalilovic and Marion Cotillard return to Berlin to team up for another rite-of-passage story in The Ice Tower.
Revolving around a secretive movie star’s seduction of a runaway teenager on and off the set of a cinematic adaptation of The Snow Queen, Hadžihalilovic transforms a sliver of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale into a slow-moving and stone-cold nightmare. Despite a solid performance from newcomer Clara Pacini and suitably ominous imagery, the Berlinale competition entry is too rugged and forbidding to grant the auteur the festival acclaim she received for her previous film, Earwig.
In hindsight, The Snow Queen could easily be considered a proto-feminist text. Turning the Prince Charming formula on its head, the fairytale features a young woman’s emergence into mature adulthood through her heroic search and rescue of her soulmate with donors and helpers who are nearly entirely female. This would seem fertile ground, then, for a filmmaker whose first film is a sharp allegory about grooming in a patriarchal society. But bar an attempt to highlight women’s contributions to predominantly male realms – the work of female assistant directors, make-up artists and continuity supervisors are very much seen and heard here – The Ice Tower isn’t that kind of film.
Using only a small part of the source material – that is, the meeting between young Gerda and the Snow Queen – Hadžihalilovic and co-writer Geoff Cox have fashioned something akin to a cross between Nosferatu and Sunset Boulevard/All About Eve with a narrative playing at half speed and the ennui dialed up to 11. In fact, with its story revolving around a film shoot, on-screen nods to other classics (the protagonist Jeanne’s resemblance to her burnt-at-the-stake namesake; a very visible glimpse of a poster of The Red Shoes) and a near-comical cameo from an almost unrecognisable Gaspar Noé, Hadžihalilovic’s latest outing is more a metatextual exercise than anything else.
While cinephiles might revel in all this, The Ice Tower ends up being a cold and forbidding affair. Bolstered by Jonathan Ricquebourg’s camerawork, the film’s first 15 minutes offer riveting imagery aplenty, as we see the protagonist descend snow-capped alpine slopes and venture into a small wintry town with its dimly lit, mysterious marble-clad arcades. But the aura soon gives way to lethargy as the action unfolds in the film shoot within the film, despite the best efforts of Cotillard and Pacini to inject frisson into their budding push-pull relationship.
In her first leading role, Pacini plays Jeanne, the eldest of a group of orphans from a far-flung foster home in the French Alps in the 1970s. Fleeing an impoverished lifestyle that seems to have remain unchanged since Andersen’s times in the 19th century, the teenager finds herself homeless and terrified by the menacing presence of the men in town. Seeking food and somewhere warm to sleep, she breaks into a building and dozes off, waking up to find herself in the midst of the shoot of a Snow Queen movie.
Recruited by a sympathetic production assistant as an extra, Jeanne – who has rechristened herself as Bianca (“white”), the name of the owner of a handbag she picked up on the street – quickly captures the attention of Cristina van der Berg (Cotillard), the production’s tantrum-throwing, drug-taking star. Taking the teenager under her wing, the diva schemes to help her young charge climb the ranks in the shoot. At first delighted to have found a kindred spirit and a surrogate mother, Jeanne gradually discovers the price to pay for the frosty Queen Bee’s protection and bestowment of prestige.
While promoting Innocence in 2004, Hadžihalilovic declined repeatedly to explain the film’s obscure narrative, saying how she would prefer to leave it to the audience to read what they like into the story. It’s something the director won’t have to contend with this time round, as she has offered something that doesn’t really have that much room for interpretation. Rather than being some coded critique about the fascination with youth in showbusiness and society, or an allegory about society’s cannibalism and exploitation of the young, The Ice Tower is simply about a fatal attraction gone awfully wrong. Beyond the chilly and admittedly glittery surface, there’s insufficient feeling to engage or perturb the viewer – something the best of fairytales should always do.
Director: Lucile Hadžihalilovic
Screenwriters: Lucile Hadžihalilovic, Geoff Cox
Producer: Muriel Merlin
Cast: Marion Cotillard, Clara Pacini, August Diehl, Gaspar Noe
Director of photography: Jonathan Ricquebourg
Editors: Nassim Gordji Tehrani
Production designer: Julia Irriabarria
Sound designers: Ken Yasumoto, Etienne Haug
Production companies: 3B Productions
World sales: Goodfellas
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Competition)
In French
118 minutes
