Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s The Ice Tower is a cool, exacting reverie: a 1970s period piece, replete with skating girls and brutalist architecture, and a cinematic snow globe refracting Hans Christian Andersen’s oddest tale.
Shot in France and northern Italy with Jonathan Ricquebourg’s icy, widescreen precision, the film’s frosted palette, long close-ups and hall-of-mirrors compositions create a self-contained world where artifice is simultaneously refuge, threat and doorway to the unconscious.
With a nod to mesmerism, the metronomic beats of Nassim Gordji Tehrani, the film’s editor, cast a lulling, hypnotic spell. Despite the princessy magnificence of Emilie Malfaisan’s glistening dress design, this is unlikely to be mistaken for Frozen II.
At its glacial heart is Jeanne (played by the impressive newcomer Clara Pacini), a teenager who flees her mountain orphanage and drifts toward a film studio shooting a version of The Snow Queen. Mistaken for an extra, she is quickly absorbed into the production’s dream logic, where boundaries between reality, fantasy and performance scarcely hold.
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In common with the protagonists of Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence and Evolution, The Ice Tower leans into the sinister corners of coming-of-age, with barely understood glimpses of the adult world.
These mysteries and Jeanne’s fascination with the film’s star, Cristina (played with glamorous froideur by Marion Cotillard) coalesce into a constant sense of menace. This is no country for a young girl. Their relationship oscillates between mentorship, projection and predation.
Hadzihalilovic reduces the Andersen tale to a thematic framework. Mirrors, crystals and staged snowfalls are recurring motifs, underscoring the film’s interest in illusion, doubles and the escapist thrill of becoming someone else.
Scenes of Jeanne wandering through sets, watching Cotillard review herself in dailies or staring at ice-skaters set the otherworldly heroine apart. This is a seductive hinterland of dark and projected desires, and mostly, of viewing from the darkness.
The director’s formal control, from the eerie electronic sounds of an ondes Martenot to the startling image of blood flowering across ice, collides the cinematic and the liminal.
The Ice Tower is at Triskel, Cork, from Sunday, November 30th, and Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast, from Friday, December 19th
